Catching Up: Zhou, Ukraine, Covid
What can one say about Zhou’s big moment last night. It was another train wreck, as pretty much everyone knew and expected it to be. When even Andrea Mitchell refers to “weird” moments when no one knew what Zhou was talking about, well … Then again, neither did Zhou. That being the case, it seems fitting to leave all comments to The Babylon Bee:
I doubt that Americans will soon forget the people responsible for bringing us to this SOTU.
On to Ukraine - Russia. In terms of event oriented news, there’s not that much to report. Col. Macgregor told Tucker Carlson that the endgame is beginning—the Russians are starting to go into the urban pockets to root out resistance. That will be messy because, unlike usual American practice, the Russians didn’t first spend a month bombing the living crap out of anything that moved.
Regarding the big picture perspective, people are noticing that NATO is starting to basically fall apart—at least in terms of what its core mission has become: squeezing Russia. Frontline countries are backing away from providing any serious help to non-NATO Ukraine. It appears, as we noted earlier, that the US saw this coming. That’s the logical explanation for the formation of AUKUS, which would otherwise appear to be redundant. This big picture development is probably the key takeaway from Macgregor’s comments to Tucker:
Now everybody is talking about spending lots of money on defense and lots of money on NATO, but pretty soon people are going to start to ask, Why? Why are we doing this? Because it's patently obvious that NATO is not in a position to fight, not in a position to challenge the Russians.
So I think Mr. Biden's problem tonight is not just [that] his narrative is gonna break down very rapidly over the next few days. This will become obvious, that this whole Ukraine business was a fantasy on his part. He's gonna end up trying to write checks that he can't cash, because we can't afford to put more forces forward and if we try to do it it'll be self defeating. So I think we're in a real crisis that nobody has really figured out yet, and that is: NATO itself and our position on the European continent. All of this is now at risk.
Remember the good old days, before the Neocons hijacked our country?
Communication has degenerated into censorship, demonizing the other, and propaganda, 24/7. At home and abroad.
Trust the experts. I’ve heard that somewhere before. When you hear that, don’t bother checking your wallet, although that’s a thought—check your freedom. In the meantime, here’s a bit of a propaganda antidote to share with contacts: ‘Madman Putin’: The Globalists’ Misinformation Play.
Here’s a big picture article that discusses the possible, even likely, fallout from all of this, by Michael Hudson:
Hudson begins with an anecdote regarding Herman Kahn’s response to liberals who like to say that “wars never solved anything.” Kahn had a ready list of things that had been solved by wars—or at least changed by wars. The proper approach, says, Hudson, is this:
The question to ask is what today’s New Cold War is trying to change or “solve.” To answer this question, it helps to ask who initiates the war. There always are two sides—the attacker and the attacked. The attacker intends certain consequences, and the attacked looks for unintended consequences of which they can take advantage. In this case, both sides have their dueling sets of intended consequences and special interests.
That’s the approach Hudson applies in the article to the New Cold War. Here’s an extended excerpt from his conclusion. As you’ll see, he envisions a New World Order of a distinctly different sort from what Neocons envisioned:
So the most pressing U.S. strategic aim of NATO confrontation with Russia is soaring oil and gas prices, above all to the detriment of Germany. In addition to creating profits and stock market gains for U.S. oil companies, higher energy prices will take much of the steam out of the German economy. That looms as the third time in a century that the United States has defeated Germany—each time increasing its control over a German economy increasingly dependent on the United States for imports and policy leadership, with NATO being the effective check against any domestic nationalist resistance.
Higher gasoline, heating and other energy prices also will hurt U.S. consumers and those of other nations (especially Global South energy-deficit economies) and leave less of the U.S. family budget for spending on domestic goods and services. ...
Food prices also will rise, headed by wheat. (Russia and Ukraine account for 25 percent of world wheat exports.) This will squeeze many Near Eastern and Global South food-deficit countries, worsening their balance of payments and threatening foreign debt defaults.
Russian raw materials exports may be blocked by Russia in response to the currency and SWIFT sanctions. This threatens to cause breaks in supply chains for key materials, including cobalt, palladium, nickel and aluminum (the production of which consumes much electricity as its major cost—which will make that metal more expensive). If China decides to see itself as the next nation being threatened and joins Russia in a common protest against the U.S. trade and financial warfare, the Western economies are in for a serious shock.
The long-term dream of U.S. New Cold Warriors is to break up Russia, or at least to restore its Yeltsin/Harvard Boys managerial kleptocracy, with oligarchs seeking to cash in their privatizations in Western stock markets. OGAM still dreams of buying majority control of Yukos and Gazprom. Wall Street would love to recreate a Russian stock market boom. And MIC investors at happily anticipating the prospect of selling more weapons to help bring all this about.
Russia’s intentions to benefit from America’s unintended consequences
What does Russia want? Most immediately, to remove the neo-Nazi anti-Russian core that the Maidan massacre and coup put in place in 2014. Ukraine is to be neutralized, which to Russia means basically pro-Russian, dominated by Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea. The aim is to prevent Ukraine from becoming a staging ground of U.S.-orchestrated anti-Russian moves a la Chechnya and Georgia.
Russia’s longer term aim is to pry Europe away from NATO and U.S. dominance—and in the process, create with China a new multipolar world order centered on an economically integrated Eurasia. The aim is to dissolve NATO altogether, and then to promote the broad disarmament and denuclearization policies that Russia has been pushing for. ...
Now that it should be obvious to any informed observer that (1) NATO’s purpose is aggression, not defense, and (2) there is no further territory for it to conquer from the remains of the old Soviet Union, what does Europe get out of continued membership? It is obvious that Russia never again will invade Europe. It has nothing to gain—and had nothing to gain by fighting Ukraine, except to roll back NATO’s proxy expansion into that country and the NATO-backed attacks on Novorossiya.
Will European nationalist leaders (the left is largely pro-US) ask why their countries should pay for U.S. arms that only put them in danger, pay higher prices for U.S. LNG and energy, pay more for grain and Russian-produced raw materials, all while losing the option of making export sales and profits on peaceful investment in Russia—and perhaps losing China as well?
The U.S. confiscation of Russian monetary reserves, following the recent theft of Afghanistan’s reserves (and England’s seizure of Venezuela’s gold stocks held there) threatens every country’s adherence to the Dollar Standard, and hence the dollar’s role as the vehicle for foreign exchange savings by the world’s central banks. This will accelerate the international de-dollarization process already started by Russia and China relying on mutual holdings of each other’s currencies.
Over the longer term, Russia is likely to join China in forming an alternative to the U.S.-dominated IMF and World Bank. ...
Did the American blob actually think through the consequences of NATO’s war?
It is almost black humor to look at U.S. attempts to convince China that it should join the United States in denouncing Russia’s moves into Ukraine. The most enormous unintended consequence of U.S. foreign policy has been to drive Russia and China together, along with Iran, Central Asia and other countries along the Belt and Road initiative.
Russia dreamed of creating a new world order, but it was U.S. adventurism that has driven the world into an entirely new order—one that looks to be dominated by China as the default winner now that the European economy is essentially torn apart and America is left with what it has grabbed from Russia and Afghanistan, but without the ability to gain future support.
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I suspect that the blow-back from our misbegotten Ukraine adventure will be such that they will rock US politics in ways we haven’t seen since Vietnam.
Yesterday I was arguing that the Left has fallen out of love with Covid under the pressure of public anger. The want us now to “move on,” as the cant phrase goes. Have you noticed something?
I argued that the consequences of the Covid Regime will be with us for years and will not be forgotten. Indeed, bad as it’s all been, those consequences may only just beginning. Karl Denninger discusses all this, and I excerpt here about the first third of his piece:
That's my latest "best guess" when it comes to people who took the jabs for permanent and material impairment of their health.
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Incidentally that might be conservative; I would not be surprised if its worse than that.
My estimates in this regard keep going the "wrong" way; what was a couple months ago one in a couple hundred is now close to ten times worse than that.
This is yet another data set, this time from Israel and Pfizer which was intentionally suppressed and is still being intentionally suppressed.
... There is a furious attempt at present to deflect the most-obvious and outrageous examples of harm, specifically cardiac damage in young men, with the claim that "its transitory."
That's flat-out BS; heart damage is nearly always both cumulative and permanent.
What's also in the data and extremely serious is this:
Additionally, roughly 24% of people with pre-existing autoimmune disorders, and 5%-10% of those with diabetes, hypertension, and lung and heart disease, also reported a worsening of their condition.
That's not 1 in 30 -- its anywhere from one in 20 to one in FOUR!
These are not transient problems folks; they're disability-enhancing or even disability-causing health problems.
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... There are always unknowns when you do something new and this was clearly new, but in addition as with Run-Death-Is-Near the history of this particular path (vector-based jabs, whether viral or mRNA) is one of serious problems and, in the context of mRNA, failures.
Typically as time goes on you qualify some of the concerns and they drop off. That didn't happen this time; instead what occurred is that the concerns got much worse. As soon as that started to show up in the data, which was evident by last March, the entire program should have been immediately scrapped until the issues were run to the ground and fully understood, bounded and qualified with the public choosing based on truthful and clearly-communicated information.
This was not only not done it was deliberately concealed with "Big Tech", so-called "public health" and political organizations all lying through their teeth while refusing to examine or even publish truthful data sets.
The entire medical, pharmaceutical and political apparatus in this nation lied. The lies started with Trump's "Emergency" declaration, payment schemes and pulled-forward orders without evidence of effectiveness and not one bit of any of it has been rescinded since by either Trump's or Biden's administration.
Have you noticed? There’s just a lot of bad sh*t out in the future. I hope it’s not all going to converge, but at this point it’s just hope.
Some of the economic warfare is seizing of gold reserves, ships, threatening the Ruble, Switzerland abandoning their bank secrecy, threats to kick Russia out of SWIFT, are all going to have a huge longer term cost. And Taiwan said it would no longer sell chips to Russia.
Plus, financial sanctions, including Apple and Google pay not working, will have a huge backlash. Same as the censorship. Which country wants to be at the mercy of Cupertino, Menlo Park, San Francisco, and Mountain View Tech Giants?
China is taking notes on the US Economic Sanctions, will offer alternatives, and countries will require the ability for Apple and Google not to repeat this for payments within their country.
And India is figuring out how to purchase stuff from Russia, without using US Dollars.
The use of all the economic weapons above is going to re-order the world's finance system. Short term it's working, but longer term it's a HUGE lever to destroy the US Dollar as the world's reserve currency. The US and West is showing it can't be trusted.
Michael Goodwin writes in today's NY Post "In short, as awful as events in Ukraine are, they likely signal just the start of a new wave of hot-button confrontations. Our adversaries are determined to create a new world order, and our president is . . . Joe Biden. Heaven help us."
I am much more concerned about the New World Order being created by our present regime together with all the Western oligarchs.