Was Louis Wain Mentally Ill? Or, Was He Accessing An Unusual Perceptual Modality?

flashbak  |  Louis Wain (5 August 1860 – 4 July 1939) was an English artist and diagnosed schizophrenic who made a name from drawing self-conscious, trippy and anthropomorphic cats and kittens. At the peak of his powers, he cranked out 1500 original paintings and sketches of cats every year. They were copied by the million. In Christmas 1903, you could buy 13 new Louis Wain books. He illustrated more than two-hundred books and had sixteen very successful Christmas annuals. “He made the cat his own,” said the author H.G. Wells. “He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world.” He was elected president of the National Cat Club, of course. “Louis Wain was on all our walls some 15 to 20 years ago,” wrote politician Ramsay MacDonald in 1925. “Probably no artist has given a greater number of young people pleasure than he has.”

A cat that has “lived a life of ease, seeing nobody and nothing beyond its mistress, will exhibit the most striking characteristics of its mistress. Another cat will, perhaps, show itself in the highest degree suspicious, taking after its master or mistress again; while a fourth, that has had to fight his way, will quarrel and rush at everything; and a fifth, that has been allowed to roam the country, will ruffle up its straw, get underneath its bed to hide right out of sight, and nothing but force will move it.”

– Wain – the November 1889 issue of Cassell’s Magazine on what he had learned from judging cat shows.

Wain was 24 when he sold his first drawing of cats to The Illustrated London News. Called ‘A Kitten’s Christmas Party’, the picture portrayed 150 cats doing all manner of humanistic things – holding a ball, sending invitations, playing games and making speeches. Spread over two pages, it was an instant hit. A few years earlier he’d sold his first picture: a  drawing of bullfinches. He drew more birds and animals with little success. And then came the catharsis. At age 23, Wain fell ill. Peter, a black-and-white cat, would sit on his bed. Wain passed the time by sketching his pal and handing the sketches to his wife, Emily. One picture featured 150 cats, each one doing its own thing. Success was his. Then tragedy struck. Three years after their marriage, Emily died.

How this changed Wain, we cannot be certain. But he never remarried and his mental health deteriorated. Despite huge commercial success, by the 1920’s Wain was broke. In 1924 he was committed to the pauper ward of London’s Springfield Mental Hospital. He continued to drew cats, experimenting with new styles and colours.

In 1925, his plight became common knowledge. A public appeal was made that raised £2,300. The money enabled Wain to move to the Bethlem Royal Hospital.

In 1930 Wain was transferred to Napsbury Hospital, near St Albans. Exhibitions of his work were held in London in 1931 and 1937, as well as a memorial exhibition shortly after his death.

 

 

Sensory Experience As Shortcut In A Multi-Modal User Interface

meaningfulparticipation |  The case against reality by Donald D. Hoffman Subtitled “How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes”

• Multimodal user interface (MUI) theory*: MUI theory states that “perceptual experiences do not match or approximate properties of the objective world, but instead provide a simplified, species-specific, user interface to that world.”

Perception is not a window on objective reality. It is an interface that hides objective reality behind a veil of helpful icons.

I take my perceptions seriously, but not literally.

startling “Fitness-Beats-Truth” (FBT) theorem, which states that evolution by natural selection does not favor true perceptions—it routinely drives them to extinction. Instead, natural selection favors perceptions that hide the truth and guide useful action.

Space, time, and physical objects are not objective reality. They are simply the virtual world delivered by our senses to help us play the game of life.

Physics and evolution point to the same conclusion: spacetime and objects are not foundational. Something else is more fundamental, and spacetime emerges from it.

Our senses report fitness, and an error in this report could ruin your life. So our senses use “error-correcting codes” to detect and correct errors. Spacetime is just a format our senses use to report fitness payoffs and to correct errors in these reports.

we differ from rocks in two key respects. First, we experience sensations. Second, we have “propositional attitudes,” such as the belief that rocks don’t have headaches we also have meaning, problem solving capability and enactors

Like a rock, we have bona fide physical properties. But unlike a rock, we have conscious experiences and propositional attitudes. Are these also physical? If so, it’s not obvious: What is the mass of dizziness, the velocity of a headache, or the position of the wonder why Chris won’t call?

Our failure to envision a mechanism does not preclude one. Perhaps we’re not clever enough, and an experiment will teach us what we can’t surmise from an armchair. After all, we invest in experiments because they often repay us in surprise.

Sperry’s explanation was simple and profound. When you fixate on the cross in KEY + RING, the neural pathways from eye to brain send KEY only to the right hemisphere, and RING only to the left. If the corpus callosum is intact, the right hemisphere then tells the left about KEY, and the left tells the right about RING, so that the person sees KEY RING.

What false assumption bedevils our efforts to unravel the relation between brain and consciousness? I propose it is this: we see reality as it is.

::Perception is always relative to WII. WII creates the context and filter for our perception::

::Placebo as example of reality models making reality::

beauty is a perception of fitness payoffs on offer,

The predictions of evolution about beauty are surprising but, as we will see in chapter nine, its predictions about physical objects are disconcerting: objects, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder and inform us about fitness—not about objective reality.

What's The Basis For The Claim That These ONLY Provide Structure, Support And Movement?

micro-magnet |   Common to all eukaryotic cells, these filaments are primarily structural in function and are an important component of the cytoskeleton, along with microtubules and often the intermediate filaments. Microfilaments range from 5 to 9 nanometers in diameter and are designed to bear large amounts of tension. In association with myosin, microfilaments help to generate the forces used in cellular contraction and basic cell movements. The filaments also enable a dividing cell to pinch off into two cells and are involved in amoeboid movements of certain types of cells.

Microfilaments are solid rods made of a protein known as actin. When it is first produced by the cell, actin appears in a globular form (G-actin; see Figure 1). In microfilaments, however, which are also often referred to as actin filaments, long polymerized chains of the molecules are intertwined in a helix, creating a filamentous form of the protein (F-actin). All of the subunits that compose a microfilament are connected in such a way that they have the same orientation. Due to this fact, each microfilament exhibits polarity, the two ends of the filament being distinctly different. This polarity affects the growth rate of microfilaments, one end (termed the plus end) typically assembling and disassembling faster than the other (the minus end).

Unlike microtubules, which typically extend out from the centrosome of a cell, microfilaments are typically nucleated at the plasma membrane. Therefore, the periphery (edges) of a cell generally contains the highest concentration of microfilaments. A number of external factors and a group of special proteins influence microfilament characteristics, however, and enable them to make rapid changes if needed, even if the filaments must be completely disassembled in one region of the cell and reassembled somewhere else. When found directly beneath the plasma membrane, microfilaments are considered part of the cell cortex, which regulates the shape and movement of the cell's surface. Consequently, microfilaments play a key role in development of various cell surface projections (as illustrated in Figure 2), including filopodia, lamellipodia, and stereocilia.

Illustrated in Figure 2 is a fluorescence digital image of an Indian Muntjac deer skin fibroblast cell stained with fluorescent probes targeting the nucleus (blue) and the actin cytoskeletal network (green). Individually, microfilaments are relatively flexible. In the cells of living organisms, however, the actin filaments are usually organized into larger, much stronger structures by various accessory proteins. The exact structural form that a group of microfilaments assumes depends on their primary function and the particular proteins that bind them together. For instance, in the core of surface protrusions called microspikes, microfilaments are organized into tight parallel bundles by the bundling protein fimbrin. Bundles of the filaments are less tightly packed together, however, when they are bound by alpha-actinin or are associated with fibroblast stress fibers (the parallel green fibers in Figure 2). Notably, the microfilament connections created by some cross-linking proteins result in a web-like network or gel form rather than filament bundles.

Over the course of evolutionary history of the cell, actin has remained relatively unchanged. This, along with the fact that all eukaryotic cells heavily depend upon the integrity of their actin filaments in order to be able to survive the many stresses they are faced with in their environment, makes actin an excellent target for organisms seeking to injure cells. Accordingly, many plants, which are unable to physically avoid predators that might want to eat them or harm

them in some other way, produce toxins that affect cellular actin and microfilaments as a defensive mechanism. The death cap mushroom, for example, produces a substance called phalloidin that binds to and stabilizes actin filaments, which can be fatal to cells.

 

Ultimate Computing: Biomolecular Consciousness And NanoTechnology

This book has been written by an anesthesiologist because of a confluence of two fascinations. The first is the nature of consciousness, which anesthesiologists routinely erase and restore in their patients. The second is a fifteen year trail of notions that would not go away. While a third year medical student in 1972, I spent a summer research elective in a cancer laboratory. For some reason I became fascinated and fixated by one particular question. When cells divided, the chromosomes were separated and daughter cell architecture established by wispy strands called mitotic spindles (“microtubules”) and cylindrical organelles called centrioles. Somehow, the centrioles and spindles “knew” when to move, where to go, and what to do. The uncanny guidance and orientation mechanism of these tiny biomolecular structures seemed to require some kind of motorized intelligence.

At about the same time, electron microscopy techniques were revealing the interior of all living cells to be densely filled with wispy strands, some of which were identical to mitotic spindles. Interconnected in dynamic parallel networks, these structures were thought to serve a purely supportive, or mechanical structural role and were collectively termed the “cytoskeleton.”

But several factors suggested that the cytoskeleton was more than the structural “bones” of the cell: they manipulated dynamic activities, orchestrating complex and highly efficient processes such as cell growth, mitosis and transport. Another factor was a lack of any other candidate for “real time” dynamic organization within cells. Long term blueprints and genetic information clearly resided in DNA and RNA, and membranes performed dynamic functions at cell surfaces. However, a mechanism for the moment to moment execution, organization, and activities within cells remained unknown. 

Where was the nervous system within the cell? Was there a biological controller? 

This book is based on the premise that the cytoskeleton is the cell’s nervous system, the biological controller/computer. In the brain this implies that the basic levels of cognition are within nerve cells, that cytoskeletal filaments are the roots of consciousness. 

The small size and rapid conformational activities of cytoskeletal proteins are just beyond the resolution of current technologies, so their potential dynamics remain unexplored and a cytoskeletal controlling capability untested. Near future technologies will be able to function in the nanoscale (nano = 10-9; nanometer = one billionth meter, nanosecond = one billionth second and will hopefully resolve these questions. If indeed cytoskeletal dynamics are the texture of intracellular information processing, these same “nanotechnologies” should enable direct monitoring, decoding and interfacing between biological and technological information devices. This in turn could result in important biomedical applications and perhaps a merger of mind and machine: Ultimate Computing.

A thorough consideration of these ideas involves a number of disciplines, all of which are at least tangentially related to anesthesiology. These include biochemistry, cognitive science, computer science, engineering, mathematics, microbiology, molecular biology, pharmacology, philosophy, physics, physiology, and psychology. As an expert in none, but a dabbler in all, I hope true experts in these fields will find my efforts never-the-less interesting.

Starting from a cytoskeletal perspective, this book flings metaphors at the truth. Perhaps one or more will land on target, or at least come close.

Military Doesn't Want You Seeing Any More Of Its UFO/UAP Videos

vice  |  The U.S. Navy says that releasing any additional UFO videos would “harm national security” and told a government transparency website that all of the government’s UFO videos are classified information. 

In a Freedom of Information Act request response, the Navy told government transparency site The Black Vault that any public dissemination of new UFO videos “will harm national security as it may provide adversaries valuable information regarding Department of Defense/Navy operations, vulnerabilities, and/or capabilities. No portions of the videos can be segregated for release.”

The Black Vault was seeking all videos “with the designation of ‘unidentified aerial phenomena.’” This is an interesting response from the Navy because, often, military agencies will issue a so-called GLOMAR response, where they neither confirm nor deny that the records (in this case videos) exist, and refuse to say anything more. In this response, the Navy is admitting that it has more videos, and also gives a rationale for releasing three previous UFO videos.

“While three UAP videos were released in the past, the facts specific to those three videos are unique in that those videos were initially released via unofficial channels before official release,” it said. “Those events were discussed extensively in the public domain; in fact, major news outlets conducted specials on these events. Given the amount of information in the public domain regarding these encounters, it was possible to release the files without further damage to national security.”

It’s true that the three videos—which were leaked to former Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge and the New York Times—didn’t originally come out via official means. But in recent years, the Pentagon has regularly talked about UFOs, and earlier this year it showed additional clips from UFOs to Congress. The military has seemingly wanted to tell the public and Congress that UFOs are very much real and a threat, and that it needs more funding to determine what they are and, perhaps, protect us against them. But it continues to hold the videos close to the vest.

Black Folks KNOW Biden's Attempted Political Misdirection Is Weaker Than Skimmed Piss...,

BAR  |  Anyone paying attention knows that Joe Biden’s accomplishments as president are pretty sparse. The oligarchy allowed his American Rescue Plan stimulus program to go through but then put a stop on Build Back Better or any other legislation that would help the people in a meaningful way. The student loan debt relief plan is a bait and switch scam used against desperate people. Biden brags about allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies but that won’t happen until 2026 and will only be allowed for ten drugs that are to be named later.

What is a failed president to do? His 2022 midterm stump speech had the odd title , “The Continued Battle for the Soul of a Nation.” No one voted for Biden to be the nation’s religious leader, why the reference to the nation’s soul? That use of language is a sure sign that nonsense is being peddled and Biden didn’t disappoint. His failures are the reason he keeps running against Donald Trump instead of in defense of himself.

Because he and the democrats don’t have much in the way of appeals to voters he just shouts Trump’s signature acronym MAGA, Make America Great Again, over and over again. He said MAGA 13 times in his speech. Never before has a losing president or his supporters been elevated to such a level of attention.

Of course Trump differs from most former presidents by claiming that he didn’t really lose and encouraging his supporters to riot inside the Capitol two weeks before his successor’s inauguration. He still says he didn’t lose and is also back in the news after refusing to turn over subpoenaed documents to the National Archives where they belong.

But Trump’s personal foolishness should be a reason for him to be ignored instead of getting more attention. The MAGA distraction exposes the democrats’ weakness, namely living off their decades old reputation as the party of working people when they have had little or nothing to say for themselves in that regard in the Biden, Obama, or Clinton administrations.

The events of January 6, 2021 were definitely a shock to the public at that time but a year and a half of endless news stories and congressional investigations haven’t moved the needle of public opinion very much. Approximately 40% of Americans would still vote for Trump. The people calling Trump a traitor and wanting to jail him are the same people who would never have voted for him or other republicans in the first place. Trump received more than 70 million votes in November 2020, 10 million more than in his 2016 election. There is little reason to believe that those supporters will change their minds. The democrats may get lucky and keep control of congress after the midterm elections but it won’t be because Biden manages to say MAGA in every sentence.

It is a political dictum that opponents should be attacked and not voters. Hillary Clinton’s pre-election remark about “deplorables” didn’t help her get out the vote in swing states where she most needed them. Biden diverges from traditional political discourse out of desperation so acute that he repeats Hillary’s failed course of action.

He is allowed to spew subpar propaganda because he has no opposition within the democratic party. The so-called progressives stand down when they are told to do so. They are window dressing within window dressing who are allowed to post platitudes on Twitter and fool democrats into thinking they have champions in congress. Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley can even tell an obvious lie that Biden canceled student loan debt and emerge unscathed. Neither she nor other members of “the Squad” or the Congressional Black Caucus have anything to fear when they go along to get along.

They would think twice about joining in the beat down if they feared the voters. Unfortunately most democratic voters have been indoctrinated into thinking that voicing any concerns with their party leadership will lead to republican victory. Black voters are once again caught in what they see as an insurmountable trap of defending democrats regardless of what they do or fail to do.

Under The 1st Amendment The Federal Government Should Have No Role Policing Thought

mises |   There are themes in the West that are difficult to question without running the risk of receiving sharp criticism. For the following themes, for example, there is a position considered “correct” by Western collective opinion: “Welfare State,” “climate policy,” “multicultural society,” or “covid-19 vaccination.” It is implied that the “acceptable” position to each one of these themes can and should be adopted without any prior critical analysis at the individual level.

The list of these themes is not static; new ones rise to prominence in society, while others become less important over time. In recent years two new themes have emerged: “authoritarian Russia” and “communist China,” which is not surprising considering that Washington, and thus, by extension. the West, has decided to treat these two nations as strategic enemies. A recent study shows, for example, that in a very short time the percentage of Americans with a negative view of China increased dramatically, from 46 percent to 67 percent. This is not a coincidence, but the result of a media communication strategy.

The Critique of the Antiwar Position

As far as Russia is concerned, the “correct” attitude to have in the West, especially since the start of the Ukraine conflict on February 24, 2022, is no less than an absolute condemnation of that country. Support for Ukraine must be comprehensive and can receive social confirmation by a small blue and yellow flag on Facebook. Unconditional support for the economic war waged by Western leaders against Russia is also socially required for Europeans, even though they will be the first to suffer from it.

It is for this reason that the Amnesty International report of August 4, 2022, which confirmed that “Ukrainian forces putting civilians at risk and violating the laws of war when they operate in populated areas” became a media bomb, not only in Ukraine but also in the West. This report disturbs a lot of people because it is not in line with the black and white view of Russia as a criminal aggressor and Ukraine as an innocent victim.

The people who do not take the “correct” stance on the conflict in Ukraine are often accused of being “pro-Russian,” even when this stance simply consists in being objective; by considering the recent history and behavior of the various protagonists. They are considered “pro-Russian” because they do not express unconditional support for Ukraine, but more often, propose conditions for peace. Indeed, the position of most of these critics is not at all “pro-Russian,” but “pro-peace” by supporting active Western efforts to reach a ceasefire, thus sparing as many Ukrainian lives as possible.

Western media did not react when, on July 14, 2022, the Ukrainian government published a black list of Western politicians, academics, and activists who, according to Kiev, “promote Russian propaganda.” This list includes leading Western intellectuals and politicians, such as Republican Senator Rand Paul, former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, military and geopolitical analyst Edward N. Luttwak, the political realist John Mearsheimer, and award-winning freelance journalist Glenn Greenwald.

Though this Ukrainian blacklist should obviously have been condemned in the West, it has hardly elicited any reactions at all, because the Western media already agree with its conclusion: the people on the list are already criticized in their own countries for not adopting the pro-Ukrainian position. Moreover, would the Ukrainian government have dared to publish such a list if it had not had the prior agreement of Washington?

The Formation of the Collective Opinion

What is happening in the case of the attitude toward Russia, as well as in the other themes mentioned above, is not surprising or new. In his famous work, On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill is perhaps today best known for his prescient early warning of the dangers of the “collective opinion”; the “tyranny of the majority” in the form of “the dominant opinions and feelings that society is trying to impose” on a minority.

Society’s majority is naturally intolerant of nonconformism, because thinking like everyone else gives psychological comfort and strengthens social ties. Yet, though society depends on collective opinion for its social cohesion, paradoxically it also depends for its well-being on views that run counter to this majority opinion. Just as natural science progresses only through the sometimes tortuous but generally respectful process of peer review, society also needs minority opinions and dissident voices to curb the permanent search for consensus on the part of the majority.

Corporate Overlords Steady Creeping To Throttle Last Vestiges Of Peasant Dissent

zerohedge  |  A Senate bill is raising fears among some for its potential to enable Big Tech and mainstream media outlets to collude against smaller and independent media outlets.

The bill, dubbed the Journalism Competition and Protection Act (JCPA), would supersede some existing antitrust laws and allow media companies to band together to negotiate with Big Tech platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

Specifically, the JCPA says:

“A news content creator may not be held liable under the antitrust laws for engaging in negotiations with any other news content creator during the 4-year period beginning on the date of enactment of this Act to collectively withhold content from, or negotiate with, an online content distributor regarding the terms on which the news content of the news content creator may be distributed by the online content distributor.”

In brief, this means that online and print media outlets, including some of the largest and longest-established names in the industry, could band together in a kind of media union to demand concessions from tech companies in order for the coalition to continue to allow their content on the platform. Under existing antitrust laws, such cartels—which describe a collusion of firms in an industry to join together for a common financial or industry outcome—are decidedly illegal.

Proponents of the JCPA have presented it as a much-needed panacea to address dwindling numbers of dedicated local media companies who, proponents say, are often left behind in the umbrella of Big Tech algorithms and advertising capacity.

In a change.org petition that has garnered over 23,000 signatures, the News Media Alliance, one of the most outspoken supporters of the bill, explained this position, presenting it as a hardline position against the reach of big tech power and influence.

“Today, many local newspapers are struggling to stay in business. Big Tech platforms, such as Facebook and Google, control how we access trustworthy news online and how journalism is displayed, prioritized, and monetized. They capture the vast majority of all digital advertising dollars because of their outsized ability to collect consumer data.

“Local newspaper revenues have gone down and as a result, thousands of journalists have been laid off, ‘news deserts’ are emerging across the country, and dangerous misinformation that threatens the fabric of our democracy continues to flourish.”

But opponents of the bill have raised alarm bells, warning that in practice the policy will only serve to benefit established legacy and mainstream outlets, to the exclusion of anti-establishment, independent publications.

Specifically, opponents point to a section of an updated draft of the JCPA that could effectively permit legacy media cartels to demand that tech platforms censor or outright refuse to permit newer, less-established media outlets from publishing on the platform.

 

Gazprom Presents The Lullabye Of Winter For The West

DW  | Putin accused the West of attempting to "subordinate" Russia with sanctions during a speech at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok. He also announced new deals with China and Myanmar regarding gas and oil. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin has admitted some sectors of the Russian economy are suffering due to sanctions and political pressure, which he referred to as the "economic, financial and technological aggression of the West," but remained bullish on building new ties with Asia.

Putin made the comments in a landmark speech at the Eastern Economic Forum in the far east city of Vladivostok on Wednesday.

"Other challenges of a global nature that threaten the whole world have replaced the pandemic," the Russian president said.

"I am speaking of the West's sanctions fever, with its brazen, aggressive attempt to impose models of behavior on other countries, to deprive them of their sovereignty and subordinate them to their will."

However, Putin added: "No matter how much someone would like to isolate Russia, it is impossible to do this."

Grain shipments under threat

During his speech, Putin said said Russia had been "grossly swindled" by a grain shipping deal that was reached with Ukraine in July. The deal, brokered by Turkey and the UN, was intended to shield the world's most vulnerable people from a looming food crisis.

The Russian president claimed only two out of 87 ships went to poor countries, and said Russia had been unable to resume lucrative fertilizer exports which had been promised as part of the deal. Putin said he would now consider limiting the destinations for grain exports under the agreement.

Ukrainian authorities hit back later on Wenesday, with presidential advisor Mykhailo Podolyak calling Putin's proposal "unexpected" and "groundless."

"The agreements signed in Istanbul ... concern only one issue, and that is the transfer of cargo ships through the Black Sea," Podolyak told Reuters.

"Russia can't dictate where Ukraine should send its grain, and Ukraine doesn't dictate the same to Russia." 

Oil and gas in limbo

Russia is the world's largest natural gas exporter, and the second-largest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia.

Putin said Russia would renege on energy contracts if the Group of Seven (G7) countries imposed a price cap on Russian oil, threatening to cut the flow of gas to Europe.

"Will there be any political decisions that contradict the contracts? Yes, we just won't fulfil them. We will not supply anything at all if it contradicts our interests," Putin said. "We will not supply gas, oil, coal, heating oil — we will not supply anything."

Hours after Putin's comments, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told reporters: "We will propose a price cap on Russian gas... We must cut Russia's revenues which Putin uses to finance this atrocious war in Ukraine."

 

 

British Police Fear Hard Winter Of Surging Crime And Violence

thetimes |  Police forces are braced for a rise in crime, a breakdown in public order and even corruption in their ranks this winter as they draw up emergency proposals to deal with the cost of living crisis.

Contingency planning among police chiefs is under way to deal with the fallout that could result from millions of households falling into financial difficulties.

A leaked national strategy paper, drawn up by them this summer, has revealed they are increasingly concerned that “economic turmoil and financial instability” has “potential to drive increases in particular crime types”.

These include “acquisitive” offences, such as shoplifting, burglary and vehicle theft, as well as online fraud and blackmail, and crimes that “rely on exploiting financial vulnerability”.

At a regional level, some police forces are preparing for more children to be sucked into county lines drug gangs and women falling victim to sexual exploitation. Priti Patel, the home secretary, is understood to share their concern.

One chief constable has said that their force has already noticed an increase in some offences and has stepped up preparations in response. The higher price cap on household energy bills, £3,549, comes into force on October 1.

Drawn up with input from the National Police Chiefs’ Council, the document goes on to say that “a more complex and unpredictable risk is the chance of greater civil unrest, as a response to prolonged and painful economic pressure”.

A senior officer at one force in the north of England told a local MP that without significant government intervention they feared a return to the febrile conditions that led to the London riots in 2011.

The document says: “Greater financial vulnerability may expose some staff to higher risk of corruption, especially among those who fall into significant debt or financial difficulties.” It offers a glimpse of the stark choices facing the new prime minister, expected to be Liz Truss, when they take office on Tuesday. It can also be revealed:

•Truss will make a “very short” speech to the country on Tuesday making clear that she understands the pain caused by rising energy bills and offering an “immediate” package of support for families, before getting cabinet approval for the plans on Wednesday.

Only The Fiction Of Democracy Remains

scheerpost  |  There is a fatal disconnect between a political system that promises democratic equality and freedom while carrying out socioeconomic injustices that result in grotesque income inequality and political stagnation.

Decades in the making, this disconnect has extinguished American democracy. The steady stripping away of economic and political power was ignored by a hyperventilating press that thundered against the barbarians at the gate — Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, ISIS, Vladimir Putin — while ignoring the barbarians in our midst. The slow-motion coup is over. Corporations and the billionaire class have won. There are no institutions, including the press, an electoral system that is little more than legalized bribery, the imperial presidency, the courts or the penal system, that can be defined as democratic. Only the fiction of democracy remains.

The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin in Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism calls our system “inverted totalitarianism.” The façade of democratic institutions and the rhetoric, symbols and iconography of state power have not changed. The Constitution remains a sacred document. The U.S. continues to posit itself as a champion of opportunity, freedom, human rights and civil liberties, even as half the country struggles at subsistence level, militarized police gun down and imprison the poor with impunity, and the primary business of the state is war. 

This collective self-delusion masks who we have become — a nation where the citizenry has been stripped of economic and political power and where the brutal militarism we practice overseas is practiced at home.

In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union, economics was subordinate to politics. But under inverted totalitarianism, the reverse is true. There is no attempt, unlike fascism and state socialism, to address the needs of the poor. Rather, the poorer and more vulnerable you are, the more you are exploited, thrust into a hellish debt peonage from which there is no escape. Social services, from education to health care, are anemic, nonexistent or privatized to gouge the impoverished. Further ravaged by 8.5 percent inflation, wages have decelerated sharply since 1979. Jobs often do not offer benefits or security.

2 Parties 1 Ideology And Its Enemy Within Strategy

globalresearch |  Maliciously smearing approximately half of the country as existential terrorist-inclined threats to “the soul of the nation” is nothing but the crudest Machiavellian means of dividing and ruling the population.

The Unprecedentedly Dangerous Divider-In-Chief

US President Joe Biden’s nationally televised speech on Thursday that the official White House website headlined as being about “the continued battle for the soul of the nation” saw the incumbent become the most dangerous and divisive American leader in history. Far from trying to cleanse and protect that very same soul, he shamelessly spit on it by pitting his people against one another as part of an obvious divide-and-rule plot ahead of the neck-and-neck midterm elections that are only two months away.

Debunking Biden’s False Belief In Equality & Democracy

The first part that stands out is Biden emphasizing how the location of his speech, Philadelphia’s Independence Hall where the Declaration of Independence was made and the Constitution signed, reinforces the mutually complementary concepts of equality and democracy connected with those two documents. He doesn’t truly believe in either of those though as proven by White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre condemning all minority views as “extremist” earlier that same day.

Nevertheless, he pretended that he’s a true believer in them in order to artificially manufacture the basis upon which to contrast himself with former US President Donald Trump. Biden claimed that his predecessor and those who still support his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement supposedly “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” Falsely framing them as existential threats so close to the midterms is obviously aimed at manipulating voters’ perceptions.

Applying The “Rules For Radicals” Against The MAGA Movement

This crude tactic would be condemned by the American Government if it was employed by any Global South leader irrespective of whether it’s baseless like in Biden’s case or genuinely backed up by facts. Biden then channeled the infamous Saul Alinksy’s “Rules For Radicals”, specifically the thirteenth rule to “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it”, when claiming that “the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans”.

By adding that “that is a threat to this country”, the incumbent ominously implied that the full authority of the state will be brought down to bear on those who are even simply suspected of being remotely connected to the former president or his movement on faux national security pretexts. He then instantly reverted to gaslighting once again just like he earlier did by unconvincingly claiming that he supports the Founding Fathers’ vision of equality and democracy by contrasting Democrats and MAGA on false bases.

Who Really Employs Political Violence & Election Conspiracy Theories?

The same man who represents the party that frenziedly fanned the flames of the joint Antifa- and BLM-led Hybrid War of Terror on America all throughout summer 2020, whose countless antagonists were manipulated into functioning as “useful idiots” of the anti-MAGA faction of the US “deep state” (permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies), counterfactually claimed that it’s Trump and his supporters who divided the country through the use of violence for political ends.

Biden also insulted Americans’ intelligence by gaslighting that it’s only some MAGA folks who’ve ever rejected the outcome of a presidential election when most Democrats refused to recognize the legitimacy of Trump’s victory in 2016. Not only that, but their anti-MAGA “deep state” puppeteers literally concocted the Russiagate conspiracy theory that they laundered through allied congressional representatives, law enforcement, media, and NGOs to discredit the entirety of his four years in office.

How Did Western Political Leadership Come To Be Comprised Exclusively Of Compradores?

imetatronink  |  this war has reached the stage equivalent to Nazi Germany in mid-January 1945: the war is lost; everyone knows it is lost, and all that remains is the positioning in advance of the inevitable surrender, the unrestrained looting, and the occasional harassment of the never-say-die snipers who will fight to their last round of ammo and last drop of blood.

In other words, we’ve finally arrived at the most dangerous juncture of this conflict.

You see, as I have frequently observed, this war, at its deepest root, has always been an existential struggle between Russia and the rapidly declining fortunes and dominion of the long-since irredeemably corrupted American Empire.

Beginning with the fall of the Soviet Union, and continuing throughout the 1990s, the western vulture capitalists raced to divide, conquer, and despoil the unfathomable natural resource wealth of the former USSR. And indeed, in ten short years, they managed to extract a massive pile of treasure at Russia’s expense, only to be prematurely thwarted by the unforeseen rise of the previously obscure Vladimir Putin.

At first, the finely accoutered locusts believed they could manipulate Putin as easily as they had his immediate predecessors. But they were soon disabused of that fallacy. So then they began to pressure Putin and Russia by methodically assimilating into their “defensive alliance” all the previously unaligned nations that stood between NATO’s 1997 borders and the Russian frontier.

This, of course, awakened in Russia a sober sense of their increasingly precarious position, and in 2007, at the Munich Security Conference, Putin delivered a landmark speech wherein he put the Empire on notice that Russia was drawing a line in the sand beyond which it would not permit further NATO expansion. That line extended from eastern Poland to northern Armenia.

Predictably, Putin’s declarations were first mocked and then summarily dismissed.

I suspect this was the point at which Russia came to see that war was very likely inevitable in order to retain its sovereignty and security.

Nevertheless, Putin exhibited extraordinary patience. While initiating an aggressive military upgrade and expansion program, he bided his time for the next several years.

But with the threat to Russia’s strategic naval base in Syria and the US-orchestrated coup d’etat in Ukraine, he was compelled to act, albeit with considerable restraint, to alter the trajectory of events. He dispatched an expeditionary force to Syria to prevent the fall of the Assad regime at the hands of US-supported “moderate rebels”; he moved to reclaim historically Russian Crimea, and to much more aggressively support the ethnic Russian separatists in the Donbass region of Ukraine who were waging a tenuously balanced civil war against the US-installed regime in Kiev.

American designs in Syria were foiled. But the ongoing de facto NATO assimilation of Ukraine continued, as the US and its NATO allies set out to methodically construct what would eventually become the most formidable proxy army in history, with ambitions to lure Putin into a Slavic civil war that would sap Russian strength, mortally wound its still-fragile economy, and induce social unrest within Russia and discontent among its various loci of domestic power, and ultimately effect “regime change” in the Kremlin.

But, at every juncture, Putin out-maneuvered them.

Meanwhile, the decades-long superiority of Russian missile technology produced for Putin several trump cards in the form of long-range stand-off weapons capable of threatening prime US military assets virtually anywhere on the planet.

Armed with this “ace in the hole”, Putin’s negotiation posture was significantly fortified, and from 2018 onward he began to articulate much more forcefully that Russia would not abide any further NATO expansion towards its borders – most explicitly in the case of Ukraine, where the ambitious training and outfitting of a NATO proxy army continued apace.

Captagon A Big Part Of Why Ukro-Nazis Are Willing Cannon Fodder

dailyveracity |  Captagon is a drug that first came to prominence during the Islamic State’s terror wave throughout the middle east. Since 2014, the drug reportedly reemerged within Ukraine, fueling neo-nazi terrorists who have used the meth-like substance on the battlefield to overcome the fear of death, becoming what some people call “zombie soldiers.” 

The Donetsk People Republic (DPR) recently uncovered drug laboratories where ‘combat drugs’ have reportedly been developed ii village of Sopino near Mariupol, and administered to the Azov Battalion. Sputnik reported.

 DNR-Kräfte fanden Labors in der Nähe von Mariupol, in denen "Kriegs"-Drogen für ukrainische Nationalisten hergestellt wurden, berichtet RIA Novosti pic.twitter.com/PjZuDfPfSW

— Xx (@Xx17965797) March 6, 2022

“You start taking him somewhere, and they’re laughing. They don’t feel anything, no pain or anything. They’re like zombies.” describes a Donbas soldier.

A DPR soldier alleged that the drugs, which are a combination of Captagon, as well as other amphetamines, cause “stupidity and courage” among the Ukrainian neo-nazis who are said to lose all fear of death when taking the substance.

Some of the neo-nazis who were high on the drug, admitted to killing fellow Ukrainian citizens, saying “I understood that I was shooting at civilians, but I was high on drugs, I was following orders”

Captagon, before being banned throughout the western world, was first manufactured in 1961 as an alternative to amphetamine and methamphetamine—used at the time to treat narcolepsy, fatigue, and the behavioral disorder “minimal brain dysfunction.”

Since, the illegal manufacturing of the substance exploded throughout eastern Europe and the Middle East, and is said to have fueled ISIS throughout their terror campaign across the middle east.

The ‘Combat Drug’ has since become a staple for the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, who is said to manufacture the substance and administer it to combatants who then are said to stay up for days without fatigue.

The Azov soldiers have gone through Ukraine, torturing, beating, and killing Ukrainian civilians. It has been reported that the Ukrainian soldiers have killed their own, indiscriminately, while laughing and cheering.

 

What Is Captagon?

Newsweek |  In the past three months, investigators across Europe have intercepted thousands of Captagon pills, an amphetamine-based drug popular with the Islamic State militant group. Nicknamed "the jihadists' drug," Captagon keeps users awake for long periods of time, dulls pain and creates a sense of euphoria. According to one former militant who spoke to CNN in 2014, ISIS "gave us drugs, hallucinogenic pills that would make you go to battle not caring if you live or die." Given similar testimony from other fighters, experts say it seems likely that the hallucinogenic pills the militant took were Captagon.

Invented in Germany in the 1960s to treat attention and sleep disorders, and highly addictive, Captagon was banned throughout most of the world in the 1980s.

On May 10, Dutch investigators said they had discovered a drug lab the previous month that was churning out Captagon pills, and they were looking for two suspects associated with the lab. In March, Greek police confiscated more than 600,000 Captagon pills in a raid and arrested four people for allegedly manufacturing the drug.

Greek and Dutch police haven't said the Captagon stashes they found were destined for ISIS fighters.

Captagon is one of the brand names for the drug fenethylline, a combination of amphetamine and theophylline that relaxes the muscle around the lungs and is used to treat breathing problems. A German company first synthesized fenethylline in 1961, and when it discovered the drug improved alertness, doctors began prescribing it to treat narcolepsy and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Though generally without side effects, says Dr. Raj Persaud, a fellow at the London-based Royal College of Psychiatrists, overuse can cause extreme depression, tiredness, insomnia, heart palpitations and, in rare cases, blindness and heart attacks. In the 1980s, when the drug's addictiveness became clear, the United States and the World Health Organization listed it as a controlled substance, and it is now illegal to buy and sell throughout most of the world.

Nevertheless, fenethylline remains popular in the Middle East, particularly in Saudi Arabia, where more Captagon is consumed than in any other country in the world. Though Islamic law forbids the consumption of alcohol and other drugs, many users there see Captagon as a medicinal substance. In October 2015, Lebanese authorities arrested a Saudi prince at the Beirut airport after two tons of cocaine and Captagon pills, which sell for roughly $20 per pill in Saudi Arabia, were found on a private plane.

Once manufactured in Eastern Europe, Turkey and Lebanon, according to Columbia University's Journal of International Affairs, Captagon is now predominantly made in Syria. The Syrian conflict has allowed for illicit activities to flourish, and many fighters there know the benefits of using the drug.

The use of drugs in war has a long history. The ancient Greeks, the Vikings, U.S. Civil War soldiers and the Nazis all relied on drugs—wine, mushrooms, morphine and methamphetamines, respectively—to get them through the horror of battle. "The holy grail that armies around the world have been looking for is a drug that gives people courage," says Persaud, and Captagon comes close. "It doesn't give you distilled courage, but it gives you a tendency to want to keep going and impaired judgment, so you don't consider whether you're scared or not," he says. "You feel euphoria. You don't feel pain. You could say it's courage without the judgment." For a fighter in a war so brutally waged, the benefits of that are clear.

 

Europeans Won't Be Shivering In The Dark By Themselves

marketwatch  |  As European governments struggle to contain the fallout of soaring energy costs to their citizens, the U.S. may also be facing a brewing crisis with an estimated 20 million households struggling to pay their utility bills.

Representing one in six households, the eye-popping number comes from a study at the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (Neada) that was highlighted in a Bloomberg report earlier this week. The total amount in arrears amounted to $16 billion in June, just under the highest number so far this year — $16.5 billion in March.

“So before the pandemic, it was about $8 billion…and then the number doubled,” the author of that study, Neada’s executive director Mark Wolfe, told MarketWatch on Thursday.

Those 20 million households — largely low-income — can be anywhere from 30 to 90 days in arrears on utility payments, said Wolfe, who has been tracking the data for about 10 years.

Jean Su, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, which tracks utility disconnections across the U.S. told Bloomberg that she expects a “tsunami of shutoffs.”

The rise in the cost of living was at a 40-year-high at 8.5% in July compared to the year before. Grocery prices continued to soar — the price increase was 13.1% compared to the same period last year. Many Americans reported they have already dipped into savings to pay for bills and bought smaller package sizes and cheaper alternatives to cut down on costs.

Because of the rising costs, lower-income Americans are already struggling to pay back credit-card loans and purchase big-ticket items like automobiles, Radha Seshagiri told MarketWatch previously. Seshagiri is the public policy and system change director at SaverLife, a nonprofit that helps families with low and moderate incomes to save money.

Residents living in rural areas were seeing even bigger impacts of inflation and the recent rise in energy costs, according to a report by Iowa State University professor Dave Peters, which studied the impact of inflation in small towns.

“The biggest inflationary impact on rural households has been the increased cost of transportation, which is essential in rural areas where residents have to drive longer distances to work, school, or to shop for daily needs.” Peters wrote in the report.

Rural people are paying $2,470 per year more for gasoline and diesel fuels than they did two years ago, while urban dwellers are paying $2,057 more, according to the report.

 

WRT Ukraine - India Ain't Have To Lie To Nobody About Nothing

indianpunchline |  The US media vaguely claims that Ukrainian forces are making “tactical gains” and are preparing “for a long and hard-fought battle before winter sets in… Western officials cautioned the counteroffensive won’t sweep the Russian forces out of Ukraine any time soon. However, success in retaking the region of Kherson and gaining control of the western side of the river would be “really significant.” (Politico) 

The daily noted, “Such a victory would show Ukraine’s Western allies that they are right to continue sending billions of dollars of weapons and supplies to help counter Russia.” 

This last bit is the crux of the matter. The arms supplies from European countries to Ukraine have virtually dried up to a trickle and a similar trend is discernible with the US supplies too. The Biden Administration is asking Congress to approve another $11.7 billion in aid for Ukraine but that is in anticipation of the likelihood that the 2023 budget may not be passed by the deadline of Oct. 1. The White House Office of Management and Budget announcement on Sept. 2 acknowledges that this is “a short-term continuing resolution to keep the Federal government running.” 

The OMB statement says the White House wants this anomaly because funds from previous packages to boost Ukrainian military are running low, with three-quarters distributed or committed, and more will follow in the next month. Importantly, though, of the $11.7 billion requested by the White House, $4.5 billion would go toward replenishing Pentagon’s depleted stockpiles, $4.5 billion to budgetary support for Ukraine’s government, and only $2.7 billion to defence and intelligence aid as such. This new round of aid is intended to last through December. 

Zelensky must be a worried man. He needs to convince the US that such massive multi-billion dollar military aid has been worth it. He should show at the very least, a bloody stalemate on the southern warfront. (Russia is gaining the upper hand in Donass already.) 

There is always the danger that Zelensky might overreach. Politico disclosed: “Western governments have warned Kyiv against spreading its forces too thinly in a bid to capture as much territory as possible, since the Ukrainians would have to hold any gains they make. The officials said they expect Ukraine to reassess its military goals if it retakes Kherson. However, the city of Melitopol, also in the south, remains too far away from the Ukrainian positions, while a ground attack against Crimea during this offensive is not plausible.” 

Now, all this juxtaposes with the upbeat tone but bare factual information shared in the official Russian statements on Kherson front. Other Russian reports say that the “counteroffensive” has been virtually muzzled and Ukrainian forces have taken heavy casualties running into several thousands. It seems to be an apocalyptic scenario , too tragic to recount. 

The solitary Ukrainian breakthrough remaining as of Saturday night was a bridgehead across the Ingulets river — the so-called Andreevsky bridgehead. There is speculation that Russians may have lured the Ukrainian troops into a “fire trap.” The river crossings have been cut off and Russians are probably encircling the Ukrainian troops trapped on the western side of Ingulets with no supplies or reinforcements reaching them. 

The counteroffensive has lost its bite and is now turning into positional battles on one or two sites in the Mykolaiv-Krivoy Rog direction. A Russian counterattack has also been mentioned to the effect that the frontline now touches the “administrative boundary” of Mykolaiv region (which is a crucial city en route to Odessa.) Heavy bombardment of Mykolaiv city has also been reported. The Russians claim to have destroyed vast quantities of weaponry. 

Russia’s “domain control” can be put in perspective: the enemy is, on the one hand, caught on the bare steppe and cut down with the overwhelming superiority of Russian artillery and aviation, and, on the other hand, encountering well-fortified, entrenched defence lines. 

That said, Zelensky cannot give up, as he is desperately in need of a success story. Kiev still hopes to reverse the situation, but how that is achievable remains to be seen. 

Against this sombre backdrop, more and more sceptical voices are being heard in the US about the Biden Administration’s policy trajectory. The latest is an opinion piece in Wall Street Journal by Gen. (Retd) Mark Kimmitt, formerly Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs in the Bush administration. Kimmitt predicts that “a breakthrough is unlikely” and soon, “logistics shortfalls” may force a change in US strategy.

U.N. Spokesman Thanks Russia For Overcoming Secret NATO Operation To Take Zaporizhzhia

Head of UN mission to #Zaporozhye thanks the Russian Federation for keeping his team safe from attacks from Zelensky regime forces, who tried to stop the inspection team from reaching the plant.

"I'm glad the Russian military did what they had to do to keep our inspectors safe," pic.twitter.com/TUtsbupSAg

— Citizen Journalists (@citizenjournos_) September 1, 2022

sonar21  |  The title sums it up in a nutshell. The intelligence services of the U.K. and the United States put together a plan and directed Ukraine to carry it out–i.e., capture the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant from the Russians on the very day that UN Inspectors were scheduled to arrive. This was a highly coordinated operation. (See Andrei Martyanov’s piece on U.S. role in planning the Kherson offensive.) For example, David Ignatius, a reliable shill for the CIA, wrote a piece in the Washington Post–Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Is More Than Just Bravado. His cheerleading for Ukraine is no mere coincidence on the same day that the Ukrainian Army gambled and lost at Zaporizhzhia (warning, this is behind a firewall):

As Ukraine mounts a new counteroffensive in the southern part of the country, Zelensky’s bravado risks setting expectations too high. In truth, Ukraine probably won’t liberate its territory this year, or even next. Still, as Ukrainian forces push toward the Black Sea coast, Zelensky is delivering a defiant response to President Vladimir Putin’s claim that Ukraine is not a real country. Not only can Ukraine survive, it also can regain some of its occupied land.

The best defense is a good offense, as military strategists have argued for centuries. And if Ukraine’s drive toward the coast succeeds, it will restore the country’s economic viability by relieving pressure on its port city of Odessa. Moreover, it could threaten Russia’s occupation of Crimea by cutting into the land bridge that connects to the Russian-controlled Donbas region in the east.

The Ukrainian attempt to capture the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant consisted of two river crossings–1: seven speed boats carrying up to 60s that landed 3 kilometers northeast of the ZNP and 2: two barges launched several miles south of the ZNP manned by Ukrainian airborne forces.

The Russian Ministry of Defense provides an accurate summary of the action:

On the morning of September 1, the Kiev regime attempted a major provocation to disrupt the arrival of IAEA expert working group at Zaporozhye nuclear power plant.

At 6:20 a.m., seven fast-moving motorboats landed on the coast of Kakhovskoye reservoir, three kilometres northeast of Zaporozhye NPP, with two sabotage groups of up to 60 people in total.

The sabotage groups were detected and blocked in the drop-off area by Russian National Guard units guarding the territory of Zaporozhye NPP.

A unit of the Russian Armed Forces and helicopters of the army aviation arrived to reinforce Russian Guard troops in order to suppress an attempt to enter the nuclear power plant and destroy Ukrainian saboteurs.

At about 7:00 a.m., units of the Russian Armed Forces prevented another attempted landing to seize a nuclear power plant.

A few kilometres from Zaporozhye NPP near Vodyanoye, an attempt was made to land a tactical airborne assault by AFU two self-propelled barges from Nikopol. Two self-propelled barges carrying tactical airborne assault of AFU are sunk as a result of the Russian Armed Forces’ shelling.

As of 8:00 a.m., the Kiev regime has blocked the passage of IAEA expert mission from controlled territory to Zaporozhye NPP.

Ukrainian artillery is shelling the territory of Zaporozhye NPP, the meeting place of IAEA mission with Russian specialists near Vasil’evka, as well as the route of their movement to Energodar. Four shells exploded 400 metres from the 1st unit of Zaporozhye NPP.

If Ukraine had pulled this off it would have been a major black eye for the Russians and would have put the nuclear plant back in Ukrainian hands. It would have marked the first serious victory in this war for Ukraine. If, if, if. There is an old saying, “If ifs and buts were candy and nuts it would be Christmas every day.” Christmas did not come for Ukraine. They got their ass handed to them.

European People vs. European Politicians On Russia - Saying The Quiet Part Out Loud

German FM: I will put Ukraine first “no matter what my German voters think” or how hard their life gets. pic.twitter.com/GwAqIZ2jL7

— Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil (@ivan_8848) August 31, 2022

Telegraph  |  Britain is now in grave danger of falling into Vladimir Putin’s trap. His kamikaze economic war on the West will eventually take down his disgusting coterie of war criminals, but in the meantime it is beginning to inflict immense, permanent damage on the Western way of life, to the great delight of Moscow’s siloviki hard men.

We risk ending up with calamitous poverty, civil disobedience, a new socialist government by next year, a break-up of the UK, nationalisations, price and incomes policies, punitive wealth taxes and eventually a complete economic and financial meltdown and IMF bailout. The situation in the EU is, if anything, worse.

This is not a plea for pacifism, for looking away when Ukraine is being illegally invaded by a savage regime. Britain was – and remains – morally right to back Ukraine in a carefully calibrated way. Instead, this is a plea for an economic counter-offensive, for Liz Truss, the next PM, to tackle Putin’s economic and energy war head-on.

Mass, immediate intervention is inevitable, but must be designed to avoid hastening Britain’s shift into demagoguery, welfarism and socialist central planning, all steps down Hayek’s “road to serfdom” that the Leftist and green elites are longing us to take. The wrong response – because too little is done, or because the wrong solutions are chosen – would merely advance Putin’s masterplan to cripple the West.

Cheap and plentiful energy is essential to our consumerist societies. We cannot be delusional about the scale of the developing catastrophe. Household energy and vehicle fuel costs will jump from 4.5 per cent of household spending in early 2021 to some 13.4 per cent by April next year, much higher than at any time during the past 50 years, including the 1970s, according to Carbon Brief. Households may face a rise in energy costs of £167 billion, or 7 per cent of GDP, taking total expenditure to £231 billion, more than government spending on health, and that is before the hit to business is accounted for. The rise for consumers alone is more than the combined defence and education budgets.

This is equivalent to a Depression-style shock. Pay rises will protect some workers at the expense of investors, but – until and unless energy prices fall again – our national living standards will slump massively. The nation is sending tens of billions more abroad to pay for energy imports.

The state can borrow to cushion the blow, reducing future consumption to prop up current living standards, but our impoverishment cannot be magicked away. Coming after years of QE, there is a real danger of excess borrowing triggering even higher inflation, rocketing interest rates, mass repossessions and a banking crisis, so caution is imperative.

There was little the West could do other than rely on hostile Opec nations in the 1970s, the last time an energy war almost destroyed us; but it was an unforgivable error for Europe to become so reliant on Russian supplies, and to fail so miserably to increase domestic energy production. The French even allowed their nuclear plants to break down.

Putin struck at the right time: the zombified Western economy was in the doldrums. Covid was a disaster of unpreparedness and errors, increasing national debts and inflation and entrenching a dependency culture. But the Russian tyrant’s canniest move was to understand just how suicidal our energy policy had become. A toxic brew of net zero ideology, deep hypocrisy about decarbonising without making the nuclear effort, endemic nimbyism, short-termism and state incompetence had radically weakened the West.

Joe Biden, Street Fighting Man

 

Dark Brandon

"It is a lunatic conspiracy theory to believe we are controlled by a secret cabal of child snuffing globalist snake human hybrids bent on microchipping all of us into slavery and then liquifying us into a tasty stew"

Joe Biden: pic.twitter.com/O3jbE85pku

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) September 2, 2022

RT |  US President Joe Biden has apparently made a 180-degree turn on the alleged dangers posed by Donald Trump supporters, saying he doesn’t consider his predecessor’s backers to be a threat to America.

“I don’t consider any Trump supporter to be a threat to the country,” Biden told reporters on Friday at the White House. “I do think anyone who calls for the use of violence, fails to condemn violence when it’s used, refuses to acknowledge an election has been won, insists upon changing the way in which the rule you count votes, that is a threat to democracy.”

The comment was a far cry from the political rhetoric that Biden has used in recent days, including a scathing speech he gave on Thursday night at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776. He argued that “MAGA forces” – referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan – are an existential threat to American democracy.

“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” Biden said in the speech. He added in a Twitter post that “Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country.”

Biden altered that message dramatically on Friday, saying he was only talking about people who fail to condemn political violence, those who try to manipulate electoral outcomes and those who refuse to acknowledge the results of an election.

“When people voted for Donald Trump and support him now, they weren’t voting for attacking the Capitol,” Biden said. “They weren’t voting for overruling an election. They were voting for a philosophy he put forward.”

However, just last week, Biden likened Trump’s “MAGA philosophy” to “semi-fascism.” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre essentially confirmed the president’s view when challenged on his controversial attack, saying Biden is “never going to shy away from calling out what he sees.”

Biden is apparently trying to stoke fear of pro-Trump Republicans as this November’s midterm congressional elections approach. But the strategy may be risky, given reaction to past condemnations of large voting blocs. For instance, Hillary Clinton may have helped energize her opponent’s supporters when she said during the 2016 presidential election that half of Trump backers belong in “the basket of deplorables.”