Crazy talk—yep, Russia - Ukraine stuff. Zhou’s crazy talk—initially praised by state media in the US—is getting negative attention around the world. Not least, it’s getting panned in Europe:
But mark this well, because of what it says about our rulers—Tracey is absolutely right, and—as we’ll see—Zhou’s crazy talk was quickly matched by Polish crazy talk. That hardly seems coincidental:
Why would Zhou’s crazy talk about butchers and regime change in Russia upset Europe? Maybe because they need Russian energy, and the US can’t help with rhetoric alone, which is pretty much the sum total of the help Zhou is offering:
Gotta luv that one—”help convince companies in Asia or elsewhere” to divert energy they presumably need themselves to Euros who got themselves in a bind by antagonizing their main supplier? Good luck with that!
Speaking of crazy talk, Poland’s been engaging in quite a bit of that, too, acting as point NATO country for the Anglosphere that’s behind this unnecessary confrontation with Russia. It’s a role the Poles should reconsider in Poland’s own interests. Most recently, in rapid fire succession, Poland offered a “ten point plan” for subduing Russia. It’s a non-starter for most of the rest of Europe and would be sure to put Europe on the brink of an Russian energy halt—with matters already trending badly:
Then, while Zhou was still in Poland a former Polish military chief suggested that Poland has a right to the Russian Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad. It’s a claim with quite dubious history behind it, but is sure to irritate Russia. Of course, from a military standpoint, Poland is in no position at all to tempt obliteration by any such crazy move—it’s talk, but talk that could turn out to be not so cheap in the future.
Not content with that, Poland has now implicitly threatened Hungary, its erstwhile Visegrad partner:
For Poland to jeopardize its relations with the rest of Europe to please the US/UK combine seems to me the height of folly. It’s not as if Poland can actually count on either the US or the UK for much of anything, so what would be the point in antagonizing neighboring countries gratuitously? What European countries will trust Poland in the future? Poland seem to be throwing away the sympathy they might have gained by taking in Ukrainians fleeing the war.
Besides providing abundance of anti-aircraft and anti-armor munitions to Ukraine’s largely conscript military and allied irregular militias, a senior US administration official told Reuters Washington and its allies were also working on providing anti-ship weapons to protect Ukraine's coast. Ukrainian forces claimed on Thursday to have blown up a Russian landing ship in a Russian-occupied port.
Nonetheless, what must have exasperated Russia’s military leadership is a secret plan for a “peacekeeping mission” involving 10,000 NATO troops from the member states surreptitiously occupying western Ukraine and imposing a limited no-fly zone over Lviv and rest of towns which is allegedly being prepared by the Polish government.
The plan is seemingly on hiatus due to a disagreement between Polish President Andrzej Duda and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the deputy prime minister of Poland and the head of Law and Justice (PiS) Party. Duda wants Washington’s approval before going ahead, whereas Kaczynski appears desperate to obtain political mileage from the Ukraine crisis.
The prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia traveled via train to the embattled Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and met with President Volodymyr Zelensky on March 15 in a show of support for Ukraine. De facto leader of Poland, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, accompanied them. Speaking on the occasion, Kaczynski said:
“I think that it is necessary to have a peace mission—NATO, possibly some wider international structure—but a mission that will be able to defend itself, which will operate on Ukrainian territory.”
In response, Russian officials condemned Poland's proposal to send NATO “peacekeeping forces” into Ukraine asa “very reckless and extremely dangerous” idea that would risk a full-scale war between the alliance and Moscow.
“This will be the direct clash between the Russian and NATO armed forces that everyone has not only tried to avoid but said should not take place in principle,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.
Here’s a bit of an antidote—mostly for those who don’t really need it. Our rulers and their running dogs like Hannity are too crazy to heed Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s sound advice":
As President Reagan's U.N. Ambassador and trusted adviser, Jeane Kirkpatrick was one of the intellectual architects of our victory in the Cold War. But Kirkpatrick was not blinded by hubris when the Berlin Wall fell. In the fall of 1990, she wrote an article in The National Interest suggesting that the United States should become a “normal country” in the post-Cold War world. She warned U.S. post-Cold War policymakers against pursuing a “mystical mission” that reached beyond the Constitutional requirement to protect the nation's vital national security interests. Specifically, she wrote that the United States should not devote itself to establishing democracy around the world. She derided the notion that the conduct of U.S. foreign policy should be "the special province" of elites who too often do not pay its costs or bear its consequences. Such elites, Kirkpatrick warned, often develop "disinterested globalist" attitudes couched in high-minded terms such as "internationalism" instead of focusing on concrete U.S. national security interests.
This did not mean that the United States shouldn’t encourage the growth of democratic institutions where prudently possible, but Kirkpatrick expressly warned that “it is not within the United States’ power to democratize the world.” Instead, the United States, she wrote, should be a normal country--“an independent nation in a world of independent nations.”
The US “a normal country?” “an independent nation in a world of independent nations?” That sounds a lot like Putin’s claims for a “multipolar world.” How far we’ve come—from sanity to hubristic madness.
As a lead in to Dr. Doug, this video works nicely—tying several things together. This is the kind of stuff that would have been considered conspiracy theory not to long ago. But we know what they say about the difference between conspiracy theory and fact:
I’ve cited Dr. Doug in the past, and today I came across this interesting thread. We’ve seen this data before, of course, but it’s well presented—lest we lose track of this Covid aspect of the current crisis:
1/Remember this study from Denmark? It shows negative vaccine efficacy after the antibodies wane, which means an increased rate of infection if you’re jabbed. Data from other countries shows the same trend. Why? Is this evidence that the jab is impairing the immune system?
2/ Data from the UK shows higher rates of infection (rate per 100,000) with increased number of jabs.
5/I would couple this data with increased cancer sampling at Dr. Cole’s lab (reduced Killer T Cell immune surveillance), and the increased number of jabs in a short interval of time required to maintain protection.These are all indicative of compromised immune function.
Let’s finish up with some Russia Hoax tidbits. The big upcoming event, of course, is the scheduled upcoming release of extensive documentation by John Durham, in connection with this prosecutions. In the meantime, …
Regular readers will know that I rarely miss the opportunity to do penance for having trusted Bluto Barr, the disgraced former AG, by pointing out that he bears a heavy responsibility for the current governing cabal and debacle. The point is simple enough. Barr was, almost uniquely, in a position to know virtually all the dirt available on the Baidan Crime Family (and of Establishment and Deep State machinations against Trump) as well as being in a position to do something about it all. Instead he stabbed Trump in the back by doing nothing, and now he’s doing his Establishment victory lap, saying he was “shocked” by Zhou’s lies. Yeah, right. A career liar lied again, and Bluto was shocked.
Two veteran Russia Hoax researchers, Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke, go over all of this, for those who can stomach the reminder:
Their review of all the facts is couched in remarkably dispassionate language, but they conclude:
While Barr acknowledged [in his book] the massive geopolitical damage caused by the Clinton campaign’s Russiagate hoax, he inexplicably ignored Biden’s false claims about his son’s laptop, which has served to undermine our national security in ways that are perhaps even worse than the actions taken by Clinton.
...
By first speaking out and then remaining silent, Barr very directly put his thumb on the scale, leading to material ramifications for our country—including the geopolitical landscape we now face.
Jen Dyer has an interesting article out. It covers a lot of ground that we know about already, but from a somewhat new perspective—trying, in that way, to make sense of what has been learned:
A history of “knowing” things that never led anywhere.
What Dyer is focused on is the claim—and especially by John Brennan—that there were “foreign intelligence sources” pointing the US Intel Community at a Trump - Russia connection. Dyer’s contention is that these claims are, in fact, either totally unsupported—nobody has seen the sources, which may be invented—or are general and not Trump related. Something else, she suggests, is at work.
She begins by reminding us of an obvious point, but one which is too often lost sight of:
… to the extent the foreign intel was about Hillary Clinton and her emails, we should never have needed any affirmative reporting to assume that the Russians could have developed an intelligence community posture on the email issue and the emails’ contents at any time between 2009 and 2016.
The woman walked around handling classified national intelligence (and everything else in her correspondence) on non-secure IT devices, via Gmail servers, including on a trip to Russia as Secretary of State. There’s credible evidence that a cyber actor – apparently China—was saving off a copy of every email she exchanged from 2009 to at least 2013. We learned a lot about the reach of her email practices, in terms of leakage, from the 2013 reporting that emails she exchanged with Sidney Blumenthal had been hacked by Guccifer (the original). What else, exactly, do we need to know, to be sure that the entire planet had a crack at Hillary’s emails?
The Trump campaign in 2016 would have arrived at the end of a long line, if it colluded with anyone in trying to “shop” the Hillary Clinton emails around. Why wait for Joseph Mifsud to mention them as bait to a campaign advisor, when they could probably be bought off the dark web, with no red-flag paper trail, for a bargain price?
However, here’s I would summarize Dyer’s main contentions. It’s important to keep in mind what I regard as Dyer’s major contribution to the whole Russia Hoax and related matters. That is her uncovering of the MOU arrangement between the FBI and CIA that allowed CIA access to domestic material that would, under law, be exclusive to the FBI. No MOU can alter existing law in that manner, but this occurred in 2012 when “Bob” Mueller was still at the FBI. I submit, as I believe Dyer has also, that this arrangement was put in place as part of a domestic spying effort against the Romney campaign (part of the bigger picture, too, which included IRS abuse, etc.).
With that MOU still in place and working in early 2016, Adm. Mike Rogers at NSA threw a spanner into the works by blowing the whistle on the domestic spying operation—forbidding certain queries of the key NSA databases and reporting the abuses (which no MOU could remedy) to the FISC. The result of Rogers’ action was Peter Strzok’s complaint to Lisa Page that—in effect—the operations were reduced to low tech alternatives. To resume operations—and hopefully get the Intel Community to the Promised Land of a Hillary Admin, past the dangerous Trump—the FBI would need to take the lead and establish some sort of predication for accessing the NSA databases.
Dyer’s contention is that John Brennan’s claim of key information from “foreign intelligence sources” about a supposed Trump - Russia connection was used to provide that predication. While Dyer moves past this point rather quickly, it’s important that her argument strongly suggests the targeting of Trump probably began long before any actual investigation such as Crossfire Hurricane was formally opened. The likely reason for that, to my mind, is that neither the FBI nor the CIA would have wanted to give away the bogus “predication” from Brennan’s “foreign intelligence sources” as the predication for an FBI investigation of a presidential candidate, because that would have revealed that the targeting began much earlier than the summer of 2016.
Overall, it’s a great read and a useful review of the facts, all placed in a new perspective. Highly recommended.
On the Crazy Talk angle, the story seems to have some legs. Check this out for discussion and links--the WH wants us to believe this was a gaffe and that Zhou wasn't reading from a teleprompter. Free the teleprompter:
Barr's treachery was not in simply concealing information, but in promising prior to the election that he was watching areas where he anticipated election fraud, even mentioning the counties where the suspicious activity did subsequently take place by name. For some mysterious reason in the biggest cover-up in American history nobody in officialdom was the least bit inclined in investigating and prosecuting any allegations of fraud post-election. Now the narrative is that it is all President Trump's fault that we are divided and cannot move on in lockstep. The cover-up is worse than the crime. It prevents me from regarding anyone in Washington as being on the level.
On the Crazy Talk angle, the story seems to have some legs. Check this out for discussion and links--the WH wants us to believe this was a gaffe and that Zhou wasn't reading from a teleprompter. Free the teleprompter:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/03/chaos-in-the-white-house.php
Barr's treachery was not in simply concealing information, but in promising prior to the election that he was watching areas where he anticipated election fraud, even mentioning the counties where the suspicious activity did subsequently take place by name. For some mysterious reason in the biggest cover-up in American history nobody in officialdom was the least bit inclined in investigating and prosecuting any allegations of fraud post-election. Now the narrative is that it is all President Trump's fault that we are divided and cannot move on in lockstep. The cover-up is worse than the crime. It prevents me from regarding anyone in Washington as being on the level.