Category Archives: Politics – international

What is to be done?

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The article is by David Solway and its title while pessimistic of itself, doesn’t highlight just how pessimistic it is: The Pandemic State Is Here to Stay. It is, of course, about Covid, but it’s also about how everything we have experienced over the past two years was pre-planned, and we have only seen the start. I will quote all the passages from the article where there is a link so that you can go further into the issues David raises, but all you will end up with is a better understanding of how things stand. You will also understand why there will be no fighting this off, certainly not in the immediate future. This is the opening para.

In a major essay for Hillsdale College’s Imprimis series, Michael Rectenwald points to the 2018 CLADE X and 2019 Event 201 pandemic simulations involving putatively benign collaborations between the World Economic Forum, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Simulations are models of reality where different possible premises and outcomes are traced so that the approach eventually adopted is seen as the most likely to work in practice.

Writing in EarthNewspaper, Gary Barnett has no doubt that an “environment of deception” has been created and an enormous boondoggle perpetrated by a global network of royals, politicians, Big Tech moguls, Big Pharma, billionaires, and other elites, including Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum and its legion of influential graduates. The evidence he assembles is damning: area-variation mortality counts, suggesting differing batches of vaccines for experimental purposes; inflation of Covid casualty numbers; promotion of the killer drug Remdesivir; hospitals monetarily incentivized to report Covid cases and deaths, leading to a statistical explosion; and the use of ventilators, which produced mortality rates varying for different age groups from 76.4 percent to 97.2 percent.

How astonishing to find everything we have seen for the past two years has been part of a schematic worked out in advance. Nothing runs exactly to plan, but it’s been pretty close.

The authorities went about their business in the most unproductive and dangerous manner conceivable—but this is only to give them the benefit of the doubt. There is far more going on and far more at stake than most people realize, as former BlackRock portfolio manager and investor Edward Dowd has vividly exposed in a blockbuster interview with Naomi Wolf and a follow-up with Alex Jones. The BMJ reports that scientific progress has been “thwarted by the ownership of data and knowledge because industry suppresses negative trial results [and] fails to report adverse events.” Scientific integrity has been radically compromised. The evidence of fraud is both mind-blowing and undeniable. It should be glaringly obvious by this time that a tectonic shift in medical, corporate, economic and power paradigms has occurred before our very eyes.

The new social and political structure that has come about is what law professor Bruce Pardy calls the “pandemic managerial state,” which runs roughshod over every Constitutional or legal bulwark. His conclusion is demoralising, to say the least: “The Covid-19 regime is just the tip of the iceberg. It is based upon an ideological premise: individual sovereignty must yield to the expertise, authority and discretion of officials acting in the name of public welfare and progressive causes.”

Exactly how all of this appears to me. This, then, is the second-last para. The inane dealings with those who have gone all in, the ones who, for example, instantly went out and got the “experimental” vax, have been as much an eye-opener as they have been disturbing. How true this is.

In many countries a majority of citizens obligingly fall for the great swindle. In his seminal essay Discours de la servitude volontaire, generally rendered in English as The Politics of Obedience, the 16th-century political philosopher Étienne de la Boétie cogently analysed the dynamic in play. “What strange affair is this?” he asks. “To see a vast multitude of people not merely obeying, but welcoming servility… deprived of the bulk of their revenues, their fields plundered, their dwellings robbed?”

Personal freedom is not for everyone. Too much responsibility. Too much having to think for oneself.

Regrettably, in most Western nations today, there are simply not enough Trucker Convoys intent on restoring their rights and freedoms, too many people who give consent to their own servitude, too many non-truckers on the road to serfdom.

This is the conclusion although not the final para.

The “pandemic state” is here to stay for the indefinite future, though in different manifestations. Political authority has devolved into one or another form of totalitarian governance, characterized by disparate structures of repression as they arise across the political spectrum. In his must-read Scanned: Why Vaccine Passports and Digital IDs Will Mean the End of Privacy and Personal Freedom, Nick Corbishley exposes the technology of population control, showing that a return to normality is a mere fantasy.

This is the final para:

The heritage of the Judeo-Christian West, based on faith in a higher power, the rule of law and the sovereignty of the individual, has been decisively breached. We now inhabit a time of domestic menace. For those who continue to cherish their liberty, the best we can do is plan and cope.

Now read it all. But I do have to say that dealing with the people I normally deal with makes me feel we are heading into very dark times indeed.

“A war that stood out for its ‘notoriously incompetent international butchery’”

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Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward All in the valley of Death Rode the six hundred.

“Forward, the Light Brigade! Charge for the guns!” he said. Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred

That’s from The Charge of the Light Brigade, a reminder for those of you with a classical education. That was based on an event during the Crimean War. So what was that all about?

The Crimean War was a military conflict fought from October 1853 to February 1856 in which Russia lost to an alliance of France, the Ottoman Empire, the United Kingdom and Piedmont-Sardinia. The immediate cause of the war involved the rights of Christian minorities in Palestine, which was part of the Ottoman Empire. The French promoted the rights of Roman Catholics, and Russia promoted those of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Longer-term causes involved the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the expansion of the Russian Empire in the preceding Russo-Turkish Wars, and the British and French preference to preserve the Ottoman Empire to maintain the balance of power in the Concert of Europe. It has widely been noted that the causes, in one case involving an argument over a key, had never revealed a “greater confusion of purpose” but led to a war that stood out for its “notoriously incompetent international butchery”.

History does seem to repeat but in such insane sorts of ways. You do have to wonder about this: Joe Biden Tells US Troops in Poland They’re Going to Ukraine (Video) …Update: White House Corrects Biden.

And now who is going to correct the White House?

The “nature of the response would depend on the nature of the use”

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These things do escalate.

Where does this end up? Biden says U.S. would ‘respond’ to Russia if Putin uses chemical or biological weapons. 

US President Joe Biden says NATO would respond if Russia was to use chemical weapons in Ukraine, adding the “nature of the response would depend on the nature of the use”.

Pretty open-ended. Ever heard of The Gulf of Tonkin “Incident”? You have to go back to 1964 but it was the invented moment that led to the Vietnam War going full-on and full-time.

On August 2, 1964, the destroyer USS Maddox, while performing a signals intelligence patrol as part of DESOTO operations, was approached by three Vietnam People’s Navy torpedo boats of the 135th Torpedo Squadron.[1][5] The Maddox fired warning shots and the North Vietnamese boats attacked with torpedoes and machine gun fire.[5] In the ensuing engagement, one U.S. aircraft (which had been launched from aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga) was damaged, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats were damaged, and four North Vietnamese sailors were killed, with six more wounded. There were no U.S. casualties.[8] Maddox was “unscathed except for a single bullet hole from a Vietnamese machine gun round”.[5]

On August 4, 1964, destroyer USS Turner Joy joined Maddox on another DESOTO mission. That evening, the ships opened fire on confusing radar and sonar returns that had been preceded by communications intercepts suggesting that an attack was imminent. The commander of the Maddox task force, Captain John Herrick, reported that the ships were being attacked by North Vietnamese boats. In fact, there were no North Vietnamese boats present. While Herrick soon reported doubts regarding the task force’s initial perceptions of the attack, the Johnson administration relied on erroneously interpreted National Security Agency communications intercepts to conclude that the attack was real.[5]

While doubts regarding the perceived second attack have been expressed since 1964, it was not until years later that it was shown conclusively never to have happened.

Let me repeat that last sentence: While doubts regarding the perceived second attack have been expressed since 1964, it was not until years later that it was shown conclusively never to have happened.

So back to The Ukraine with the question now, are we in the same blundering into war that led to World War I? If the US wants to invent an incident they have the history. Do you remember The Maine?

A slogan of the Spanish-American War. The United States battleship Maine mysteriously exploded and sank in the harbor of Havana, Cuba, in 1898. Stirred up by the yellow press (see yellow journalism), the American public blamed the sinking on Spain, which then owned Cuba.

You now have to fear what comes next. The Americans are it seems gunning for a full-on confrontation. If they want to arrange a pretext, so many of us seem to be in a pre-war mentality, over nothing much more than whether The Ukraine should be part of NATO. 

Yellow journalism in the nuclear age

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Since we are onto another mass-catastrophe issue in The Ukraine, we don’t want to leave Covid behind without remembering what an incoherent public policy disaster it has been. And here to assist is an excellent column by Adam Creighton in The Oz: Covid fears left behind in the wake of Ukraine. I will merely excerpt from his column in today’s paper with a couple of my own comments at the end.

First, fear fuelled by the media, not science, drove much of the response…. Without the media to sustain fear, the pressure to reinstate measures will fade rapidly….

In a further tribute to the power of the media, 47 per cent of those who identify as very liberal (very left-wing) said Covid-19 was still a great risk to their personal health, compared with 12 per cent for self-identified conservatives.

Unlike the Spanish flu pandemic 100 years ago, when practically everyone knew someone who had died from the virus, few people would be aware of the Covid pandemic without media reminders. This is happening around the world….

The need for humility should be the second lesson. The health establishment was spectacularly wrong on almost every aspect of the pandemic, even demonising those willing to stand up to it.

Masks, lockdowns of businesses and schools, rampant testing, mandatory social distancing – none of it stopped the virus from spreading in a systematic way, as the evidence clearly suggests.

Asymptomatic spread – a justification for locking down the healthy for months – even turned out to be grossly exaggerated. Vaccines didn’t stop transmission and they started to lose much of their effectiveness within months.

Overall, the response will go down as one of the greatest public health fiascos once a fair reckoning of the costs and benefits of measures emerge….

Not surprisingly, experts are delicately walking back their support, one measure at a time. It’s now fashionable to say closing schools was a mistake, doing particularly great harm to children from poorer families….It’s also OK to say cloth masks didn’t work, as the evidence against them becomes overwhelming even for the numerically challenged….

“The prospect of eliminating the virus in the UK had gone, certainly by the second half of February 2020…. It was already becoming very obvious (by mid-2020), not just in the UK but also across the whole world, just how extraordinarily damaging the lockdown was going to be.”…

The New York Times, a champion of tough measures, published a high-profile article this month suggesting restrictions “haven’t made a big difference”….

Calls for formal inquiries and royal commissions into our handling of Covid-19 are nevertheless premature. Only when the current generation of leaders and health experts has moved on would such a venture reach a fair conclusion.

Meanwhile, the front page at The Oz at this very moment is Russian diplomat warns of nuclear retaliation.

One of Russia’s top diplomats has warned NATO that Russia is a nuclear power, and will consider use of such weapons if they see a credible threat.

“If they see a credible threat” Russia “will consider” the use of nuclear weapons. This is yellow journalism at its absolute worst.  As for a definition of “yellow journalism”:

The use of lurid features and sensationalized news in newspaper publishing to attract readers and increase circulation. The phrase was coined in the 1890s.

Occasionally you get an Adam Creighton. As for the rest, it is a return to the 1890s when the risk was no more than the onset of the Spanish-American War. 

That you will own nothing is a certainty-whether you will also be happy is unlikely

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These are the notes that accompany the video:

Klaus Schwab is bringing you the great reset. And not only will it be great, it’ll be a fantastic reset! The folks at the World Economic Forum are busy helping protect you from climate change and disease. Yet some people still ask, is Klaus Schwab the most dangerous man in the World? Get the full picture along with everything they DON’T want you to know in this video!

How anyone can believe they hold the key to everyone’s happiness must be the surest sign of insanity ever produced.

 

 

 

What was the 2014 Euromaidan Coup in Ukraine and why does it matter?

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This is a comment on a post at Powerline. It highlights how little we know about anything.

There is evidence that the US was involved in the 2014 Maidan coup replacing the Ukrainian leader friendly to Russia with one friendly to the US. This 2014 photo shows Klobuchar, McCain and Graham in Ukraine around the time of the coup. Why Klobuchar is circled I do not know.

On the other side of Klobuchar is Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, an Obama appointee who was fired by Trump for undermining his effort to get evidence of Biden’s corrupt activity in Ukraine. She testified against Trump in the first impeachment.

The left and the media lie to us relentlessly and shamelessly. This is from a post I put up on October 21,2020: The only evidence that the left understand right from wrong is they know what they have to cover up about. So the New York Times now acknowledges that it really was Hunter Biden’s laptop. They don’t acknowledge the corruption that they have been instrumental in covering up. This was posted just before the presidential election in the US.

But at least here in Oz there is still Sky News: Story of Hunter Biden’s laptop has ‘illuminated the power of the world’s tech giants’.

Recastled Managing Director Kosha Gada says the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop has illuminated the power of the world’s tech giants. Her comments come as the world’s digital giants over the past week were censoring stories that are critical of Joe Biden, especially of his son Hunter Biden profiting from Joe Biden’s time as vice president. “The issue really is very significant and extends far beyond the Trump presidency, and far beyond election 2020,” Ms Gada told Sky News host Chris Kenny. “It’s really … for the first time in history, we have this set of four or five companies, that in the span of 20 years are now a collective net worth of $5 trillion in market cap, which makes them the most powerful companies, and the richest companies, and most influential companies ever created in history.

Is it really possible in the world today to seal off this kind of information from people who vote for parties of the left? Of course. Just depend on the ABC for your news. Ignorance is bliss, until the election is over and Biden-Harris become president.

Is it possible for the media to suppress the truth so comprehensively? There can no longer be any doubt about it whatsoever. But what remains the most astonishing part is how those who support parties of the left are pleased to be left in ignorance of anything that prevents their side from governing.

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And from Instapundit.

SERIOUS AMERICANS ARE BEGINNING TO QUESTION THE LEGITIMACY OF THE BIDEN PRESIDENCY: 

Psaki: We have no idea if Hunter Biden got a ton of money from China and Russia. “We recently learned that the huge group of “intel experts” who signed a 2020 letter essentially declaring the Hunter Biden laptop story to be Russian disinformation have all come down with a sudden case of either amnesia or laryngitis. Not even an admission by the venerable New York Times that the story was legit seems to have helped jog their memories or loosen their tongues. The New York Post, who first validated and broke the Hunter Biden laptop story 17 months earlier, has been taking a well-deserved victory lap and they’re not done yet. A reporter for the Post brought a series of related and quite relevant questions to White House spokesperson Jen Psaki this week. They specifically wanted to know what she had learned about potential conflicts of interest for Joe Biden, given his son’s lucrative business dealings with China and Russia. Strangely, despite these stories showing up all across the media spectrum, Psaki didn’t appear to have any idea what the reporter was talking about.”

Actually they do have an idea whether Biden Father and Son are utterly corrupt. But if you think you have enough information to make a sensible assessment of what is going on in The Ukraine, you are completely kidding yourself. 

The Greatest Fraud in History

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Came across this: Wall Street analyst: COVID vaccines ‘greatest fraud in history’. This is the point:

Dowd and a Wall Street insurance analyst with whom he has teamed, concludes the CDC data show the Millennial generation suffered a “Vietnam War event,” with more than 61,000 excess deaths from March 2021 to February 2022.

That is more than just fraud, but mass murder if it’s true. But so far this only in my view makes it to second place. Above it is Global Warming about which I received a note today which said this:

Pursuing a Net Zero by 2050 target will jeopardise our energy independence and national security and raise the cost of living for mainstream Australians without making any discernible impact on global temperatures.

I see phrases like this all the time: “without making any discernible impact on global temperatures” as if this is a real problem that needs to be solved but we are perhaps either not doing enough or doing the wrong thing. For myself, the entire issue is a fraud. There is no problem that needs solving. There will be enormous costs across the world but nothing will be achieved since it is a non-existent problem, much in the same way as I think about Covid. This is not the return of the Great Plague, in the same way that Global Warming hysteria is not directed at an actual problem that is in need of solution.

The Number One fraud, to me, is and has been for a long time, modern macroeconomic theory with its fundamental equation learned by every socialist in their first year in economics: Output is the sum of Consumer Demand [C], Private Investment [I] and Public Spending [G]: Y=C+I+G.

So if there is unemployment then all the government needs to do is increase its level of spending [G] and the problem is solved.

The inflation in the US followed by the eventual collapse in its economy will demonstrate just how insane – and also fraudulent – this policy is. Trillions have been wasted over the years in pursuing this agenda with no success at any time ever in history anywhere.

But while the cretins who are funding their own lives along with their mates will do very well out of it, the rest of us will need to scramble just to stay ahead of the pack. See Venezuela (and Cuba, and the former Soviet Union) for examples of just how disastrous such policies can be.

In The Ukraine there are apparently two sides to the story

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4%3Ffeature%3Doembed

I went looking for an analysis that would provide something like the Russian perspective on the events in The Ukraine, and by coincidence the video was sent to me at the very same time. The vid is from 2015 but once you watch many bits fall into place. This is the notes that come with the vid:

The Causes and Consequences of the Ukraine Crisis

John J. Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor in Political Science and Co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, assesses the causes of the present Ukraine crisis, the best way to end it, and its consequences for all of the main actors. A key assumption is that in order to come up with the optimum plan for ending the crisis, it is essential to know what caused the crisis. Regarding the all-important question of causes, the key issue is whether Russia or the West bears primary responsibility.

And again I emphasise that the vid is from 2015 in a discussion of an earlier conflict in the same area with the same two sides involved. The first twenty minutes of the video provides a pretty good summary. 

I also went looking for something on my own and went to DuckDuckGo, but the news reports that it has gone google seem to be true. Virtually everything was from some Western “news” source, which to me meant that you cannot rely on a word they write. Eventually I found this: What Russia Wants In Ukraine from The American Conservative whose tagline is this:

Russia’s position has been remarkably consistent for nearly three decades, especially when compared to the West’s.

We are just spectators here, but if we are going to have a nuclear war, might as well understand why.