Retired child and adolescent psychiatrist and American expatriate in New Zealand. In 2002, I made the difficult decision to close my 25-year Seattle practice after 15 years of covert FBI harassment. I describe the unrelenting phone harassment, illegal break-ins and six attempts on my life in my 2010 book The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee.
After March, “we do not know what will happen with our services,” said the director of UNRWA affairs in Lebanon.
Telesur
On Tuesday, Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati called on donor countries to reconsider their decision to stop funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in Lebanon.
“Lebanon is an exceptional case in light of the current economic crisis, which must be taken into account,” he told Dorothee Klaus, the director of UNRWA affairs in Lebanon.
This country has been in the throes of an unprecedented financial crisis since 2019 and is already hosting the largest number of refugees per capita in the world, with the government’s estimation of 1.5 million to over 2 million Syrian refugees.
“Currently, 19 donor agencies have stopped or suspended grants. We can provide services until the end of March, but after this date, we do not know what will happen with our services,” said Klaus.
Daniella Weiss, Israeli politician openly admits that Zionists are brainwashed and that brainwashing is basically the only way Zionism can survive.
She’s also clear that the goal of Zionism is to take land from not just the Palestinians, but Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and others.… pic.twitter.com/RI51Rdpi2w
— 🇵🇸 #FreePalestine #FreeGaza 🇵🇸 (@realnikohouse) February 1, 2024
“If this funding is not restored, all Palestinians in Lebanon will be affected, and this includes a large number of children, 2,000 patients in our clinics, and 50,000 patients who need hospital support every year in addition to a large number of patients who depend on medications,” she said.
Klaus added that she is aware of the Lebanese government’s efforts to host many refugees in Lebanon, noting that her agency will continue to try to persuade donors about the need to support Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.
As of March 2023, the UNRWA-registered Palestinian Refugees in this country was 489,292. Their situation in this country is complicated due to the lack of opportunities to obtain a means of subsistence.
In Lebanon, for example, Palestinians are banned from 39 unionized professions, cannot work in the public sector, and have no right to own real estate.
“This means that they cannot acquire land, apartments, houses or businesses. So even if they manage to earn a reasonable income, that makes it very difficult to invest it somewhere or also for their children to inherit wealth,” Klaus pointed out.
Bankruptcy is a developing twenty-first century theme in America. We see bankruptcy in federal government policy and spending, many corporate boardroom decisions, nonprofit and religious groups’ overspending and arrogance, individuals, some United States cities and counties, and the territory of Puerto Rico. The federal bankruptcy law consisting of Chapters 7, 9, 11, and 13 allow bankruptcy filings for local governments, individuals, nonprofit groups, and for-profit businesses, but it does not allow bankruptcy filings for states and the federal government.
A few states are facing the reality of defaulting on their issued bond debt obligation payments and loan payments to lenders. These states are seeing current and future tax revenues decreases, net population losses, fewer private businesses, increased progressive welfare spending, and long-term underfunded public pension systems. US states are not allowed by federal law to print money to finance spending.
States declaring bankruptcy are not without precedent. The Panic of 1837 lead to several states defaulting on canal and railway debt payments in 1841. Passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution under section 4 required some states to declare bankruptcy after the Civil War.
Arkansas defaulted on highway bond payments in 1933 in the fourth year of the Great Depression. Tax revenues plummeted. It ran out of cash and stopped payments on all its highway bonds. The state attempted to invoke its sovereign immunity and impose losses on bondholders against their will. The approach failed. This history, described in an October 2017 Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland report, may serve as a historical benchmark for future state bankruptcies and bond payment defaults. It appears to be the only state default after Reconstruction ended in 1877.
Standard and Poor’s (S&P) listed its bond ratings of all fifty states from 2004 to 2017. Coronavirus state spending since 2020 has made the bond ratings of some states more tenuous. No state has a junk bond rating, though Illinois is the lowest rated at BBB−, followed by New Jersey at A−. S&P bond ratings go from AAA being the highest to D the lowest. S&P analysts add a plus or minus sign to the bond rating letter grade. A junk bond rating is the low probability of that state reliably meeting future bond payments, and it must sell the bond at a higher interest rate in order to attract an investor.
Illinois and New Jersey are examples of a future state bankruptcy or default on a future bond debt obligation payment. California budget deficits under Governor Gavin Newsom are proliferating as part of the spending trend. Financial press coverage of these states’ financial problems is available. New York, Connecticut, Michigan, and other states are heading to future defaults and possible bankruptcy unless budget and policy reform is enacted.
This article cannot predict how a state’s future bond debt default would play out. Payment default negotiations between that state’s revenue officials and bondholders could take place without federal bureaucrat oversight given bankruptcy silence in federal law. The bondholders and lenders will take a loss and place substantive requirements on that state to cut spending and reform its laws and policies as part of the default settlement.
The undisciplined state spending spree will be addressed through payment default or bankruptcy resulting from inescapable economic realities. This bottoming out could begin the healing process for that state’s citizens through realistic laws, policies, budgets, and tax revenue realities. This is uncharted territory, and we should not be surprised by past poor state political and budgeting choices.
One irony is that twelve US states have bond ratings from three private bond rating agencies higher than the federal government as of August 2023. Many of these states have balanced budget laws that prohibit deficit spending, and some states limit annual spending increases from a set of requirements. Stay tuned for the American twenty-first century bankruptcy shows to continue.
The war drums are beating, and public officials and the media are certain that the enemy must be conquered. The war is over there, away from home, in someone else’s. The public is conditioned to accept that war is inevitable, that for the liberal democracies of Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States it is an “obligation.” It seldom matters whether the voting tax base wants war or not. As bombs drop in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, as Israel destroys Gaza and the Russians fight in Ukraine, Washington and its allies talk about expanding the warfront to include Iran, China, and North Korea. Perpetual war is the health of empire, the glory of the nation, and the profit for a few. But who fights these wars?
Many of the veterans who fought in the Global War on Terror in Iraq and Afghanistan are past their prime, dead, injured, or cynical of the government that exploited them. The recruitment drives, even as the criteria are lowered, are seducing less and less willing bodies to fill the uniforms. The career incentive to join the military is not as appealing when war is a guarantee. Eligible young men are not so naive and removed from the understanding that their mental and physical health may be at risk that they’ll venture into another overseas war. Those who traditionally joined to protect and defend are less inclined to do so given that the military is an offensive instrument of policy, recklessly used without regard for consequence.
In 2024 it’s hard enough for employers to find capable young workers who can handle physical or moderately skilled work, and who will turn up consistently. It’s easier for a lot of people to lean into the welfare state, to seek comfortable, inconsequential jobs or to find careers that don’t involve killing. Physical and mental health is a meandering factor in a culture that swells with obesity and has a populace riddled with depression and anxiety over the mundane. In Australia it is easier and far more profitable for someone to either go on a disability pension (for a litany of real or imagined reasons), or to become a high paid support worker for said pensioners rather than diving into military or even police service.
War is often a voyeur’s experience, where some are cuckolded for the entertainment or cynicism of others. War is the religion of the Anglosphere. Every generation has its war, a foreign land that rolls off the tongue with ease only to return to forgotten obscurity in a generation’s time. Some, however, like Vietnam or Iraq linger permanently. But most are forgotten as war zones and now only exist as destinations for the soldier’s grandchildren to visit, enjoy the food, or marry from, like Korea and Malaysia. The adventurers, true believers, mercenaries, and those with seemingly no other options do still enlist, but there’s less of them.
It’s not just that the military is struggling to get new recruits, but also re-enlistments. The relationship between the military and its members is disfigured as inefficiency and dysfunction become more openly discussed. On social media anti-military voices are competing against their slogans and the empty promises of recruiters in a tug of war between the warfare state and those who are skeptical of its very existence. Social media “influencers” like the Island Boys are paid to push recruitment for the Army alongside the advertising of energy drinks and other affiliate marketing thrown their way—though it is unlikely that they themselves would enlist or be capable of doing so. The children watching are impressionable, all the same.
Woke cultural messaging has also harmed the military, as it has disenfranchised its traditional base while attempting to appeal to those who have no stomach for training, let alone warfare. The wars themselves, along with the government’s own woke cultural shift and attempts at inclusion, have deranged the recruiters task of satisfying numbers and valuable candidates for the services. Confused advertising and a disdain for the people who usually fill the uniforms in warfare has hamstrung the military when it needs bodies to kill and die for it. A woke window dressing to satisfy the academic and corporate zeitgeist may seem empowering, but in reality is another form of mandated delusion.
The government’s will for war exceeds its populations capacity to wage it. Conscription tends to not be a viable solution. Ukraine and Russia have embraced such traditions of martial slavery and it has unveiled a force of fodder to be killed. Another generation of “McNamara’s Morons” is an unsatisfactory solution which may lead to liability for both commanders and what few skilled and motivated professionals remain in the military.
Regardless of the human attrition and how thinly spread the capable and willing may become in such a war, the high maintenance of modern weapon systems will erode their capabilities over time. Skilled crews and technicians will be required to work almost non-stop, not to mention the manufacture and logistics required to feed such machines for prolonged operations, especially in combat against an enemy who is near peer or in some theaters a peer level threat. It is one thing to attack Houthis in Yemen who are recovering from years of war against the Saudi coalition but it is another to wage war against Iran or China on their home turf, a war they have been preparing for.L et’s not forget, neither of them have ambitions to invade Australia, the United States or United Kingdom. But the reverse is a constant.
Images of drones chasing Russian or Ukraine soldiers around their AFVs, only to detonate once in proximity, exposes us to the modern realities of war. The distance between the killer and the killed is not a new thing. The drone and remote weapon system is becoming smaller, with a greater range and versatility that may have people logging on for a few hours a day from home to assassinate strangers thousands of miles away with as much regard as though they are killing NPCs in a computer game. That in itself is not how wars are to be won. That same technology and efficiency of distance will be used against the invader as well. The likeliness of sympathetic outsiders “logging on” to join the fight is a reality that may also occur. Those who will fight for either side given any incentive is also a reality, so long as they have a device that allows them to connect to the remote killing machines. The future remains.
Contractors are becoming more common, professionals who are not constrained by government religion when it comes to how a military must serve and act in matters of formal tradition and legal status. They’re killers and operators who serve the government, work alongside the military, and should they die will not become a statistic that influences politics at home. Many are ex-servicemen of the government that they now are hired by, trained and motivated elements that perform tasks as a service to their singular customer. The Russians on the other hand have a more varied mercenary custom, one that is made up of contractors while also using prisoner units, inspired by the promise of pay and freedom. Both ancient aspects of war are to be dug up in a modern context.
Mercenaries and even drone operators are still only a finite resource, and automated systems are a little ways off. Wars of such a grand scale on so many fronts will still require boots on the ground. The imaginations of the stoic German soldier manning the Atlantic wall in the weeks before D-Day betray the reality that many of the defending Wehrmacht were former Soviet soldiers and a rag tag of convalescing others. Horse-drawn weapons from those captured to mutations of expedience with men in ill fitting uniforms crisscrossing a frontier that consumed men and material was the other reality far in the East. Contrary to the mechanized depictions of a technologically superior, super race of warriors, the reality, then as it is now, is that logistics, man power, and attrition are immutable factors in war.
Waging numerous small wars on a limited scale or even as an occupying force in an attempt to “civilize” a wilderness will always consume. They can become black holes that suck the life, money, and material out of an invader. Yet, still mostly men will be required for these prolonged operations and the well for such men is running dry. The post-9/11 era provided many eager bodies who felt the euphoria for vengeance against enemies. The terrorists and their “alien religion” was an easy to hate specter as the twin towers smouldered into smoke and ash. Over two decades later and the reality of such wars is more apparent to the wider public, while those willing men are now dead, injured, or robbed of their youth. The next generation does not have the eagerness for war, and the crusader’s zeal is not so widely felt.
So, as the drums of war beat and the call to arms is made by those who will never fight it, the question remains: who will? No matter what the claimed reasons for war is—spreading democracy, human rights, humanitarianism, security, or hegemonic expedience for many at home—many may very well. But agree enough to enlist? Unlikely. Many who do believe in the need for war are the creatures of Facebook or social media bobble heads, spectators and opinion spewers alike. They are most welcome to form their own battalions to fight for their cause. They won’t, but rather instead they will merely support the government in its ambition to send mostly men to die and kill. Those killers, however, are becoming fewer.Improving technology so that the human element for war is less important and finding incentives to pay, reward, and motivate human beings so that they will kill strangers with little regard are weak solutions.
The one constant, regardless of the means and methods, is that war will always hurt the innocent. Perhaps in time, as the liberal democracies depress into ill health and rely on automated machines to do the killing, it will be from the minds of the weapons who grow the morality to say, “No more.” For now, while some minds in government seek more war, the public’s flesh is less willing or too flabby to make it so.
The new official Convention met September 21, 1792, or day I of the new Republic.* Its main role was to abolish the monarchy. declare a republic, write a new constitution and decide the fate of the king. With universal male suffrage, French was now the most democratic nation on earth.
The Convention was 1/4 Jacobin and slightly more than 1/4 Girondin. The later were uncertain about the wisdom of full equality and were fearful of the Jacobins. Paris overwhelmingly chose Jacobins to represent them.
Both groups agreed the king was guilty of treason, based on 675 documents found in a secret safe revealing he hated the new constitutional monarchy, that he tried to bribe deputies and cut deals with émigrés and that he conspired with Prussia and Austria to declare war on the revolution.
Robespierre, a prominent Jacobin, who was known to oppose the death penalty, argued it was too dangerous, based on the king’s ties with both domestic counterrevolutionaries and hostile foreign monarchs, to imprison him or even send him into exile. Although Robespierre also opposed putting him on trial, the Convention eventually voted to try him.
At his trial, which began on December 26, 1792, the king claimed to remember nothing, he blamed his ministers and claimed not to recognize his own handwriting. The Convention found him guilty by unanimous vote. On January 15, 1793 the convention voted on his sentence, with each deputy taking the podium to explain his vote. Tom Paine, who was elected deputy after receiving French citizenship, voted to exile the king to the US.
The final vote was 387 to 334 in favor of execution.**
The king was guillotined on January 21 1793. Tens of thousands of guards and spectators observed the execution. After the executioner collected the king’s hair and ribbons as souvenirs, the guards covered his body with quick lime (to dissolve), preventing counterrevolutionaries from making a shrine of his grave site.
Following the king’s execution, rivalry between the Jacobin and Girondins continued to increase, leading to massive counterrevolution in several French provinces.
*Louis XVI was officially arrested on August 13, 1792 and sent to the Temple, an ancient Paris fortress used as a prison. On 21 September, the new Convention, elected by universal male suffrage, declared France to be a republic and abolished the monarchy. The same day they abolished the traditional western calendar, adopting a new one starting with year 1.
**Marie Antoinette was tried nine months later.
Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.
Two of France’s main farming unions on Thursday agreed to suspend protests and lift road blockades across the country after the government announced measures the deemed “tangible progress” in the ongoing revolt against EU ‘climate-driven’ initiatives designed to wean society off of evil, non-bug-based, carbon-emitting food while China, India, and the rest of the world laughs.
In addition to France, protests have been held in Belgium, Portugal, Greece, Germany and elsewhere. Last week, tensions came to a head in Brussels when farmers threw eggs and stones at the European Parliament building, demanding that European leaders stop punishing them with more taxes and rising costs to finance the so-called ‘green agenda.’
After French farmers stepped up protests earlier in the week, the government promised on Thursday to extend protections – including better controlling imports and giving farmers additional aid, Reuters reports.
“Everywhere in Europe the same question arises: how do we continue to produce more but better? How can we continue to tackle climate change? How can we avoid unfair competition from foreign countries?,” said Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, announcing the new measures.
In response, France’s main farmers union, FNSEA, announced that it was time to lift the blockades and “go home.” Arnaud Gaillot of the Young Farmers’ union echoed the message, however both unions warned that other types of protests would continue, and they’d be back if the government doesn’t make good on their promises.
Meanwhile in Ireland, farmers began protesting Thursday evening.
“There’s a general dissatisfaction with the level of environmental regulation that is being heaped on farmers, the low margins, and (the) resulting low income the farmers have been suffering from for a very long time now,” said Cathal MacCarthy, media director for the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association, adding “There will be a great deal of sympathy and solidarity with the aim and ambitions of the protests both in Ireland and on the Continent,” EURACTIV reports.
“They feel they are being regulated out of business by Brussels bureaucrats and Department of Agriculture officials who are far removed from the reality of day-to-day farming,” said Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA) President Francine Gorman on Wednesday, ahead of the protests.
The concerns of the Irish beef and dairy farmers echo the concerns of other European farmers who have been protesting for weeks.
MacCarthy said Irish beef and dairy farmers also believe they are not being compensated fairly for the agrifood products they cultivate, given the increased costs involved in production as a result of environmental regulations.
“We need senior politicians to face consumers and say, ‘Lads, listen, the cost of producing this food is X, that has to be paid, and the margin that allows farmers to live (has to be paid), but we can’t just be dependent on what the supermarket feels like charging their customers,’” he said. -EURACTIV
“We can either continue to have cheap food, or we can have environmentally sustainable food, but we can’t have both,” said MacCarthy.
Ambitious plans for an electrification-led industrial revolution are in full-scale retreat
France’s President Macron had a plan to make millions of electric vehicles a year. Chancellor Scholz planned to put 15 million on Germany’s roads by 2030. President Biden trumped the lot with a $174bn (£138bn) plan to make the US the world leader. Even Boris Johnson – remember him – had a £1bn plan to beef up our charging network.
Rewind only a couple of years, and almost every president or prime minister was making electric vehicles the cornerstone of an industrial strategy. And yet, this week we have learned that Renault is abandoning plans to separately list its electric vehicle (EV) and software business, while Volvo is winding down its Polestar electric sports car subsidiary.
In reality, amid an onslaught of Chinese competition, and falling sales, the West’s electric vehicle dream is quickly unravelling – and we need to relearn all the lessons in why grand, state-led industrial strategies never work.
It was not so long ago that countries were competing furiously to launch battery-powered visions of the future. With Tesla riding the wave of green demand to become the world’s largest car manufacturer, measured by market value if not volume, and with ambitious net zero targets to meet, they all wanted to make sure they could compete in electric vehicles.
We would reduce carbon emissions, create many jobs, and shore up our industrial base. Sure, governments would have to commit a few billions – or tens of billions – to make it happen. But it would pay for itself many times over.
Renault, despite the programme of state support, has this week scrapped the separate listing of its EV unit Ampere, which has been scheduled for the first half of the year. It was a “pragmatic decision” according to the company’s chief executive Luca de Meo, arguing that falling sales for EVs across Europe meant the market was more challenging than forecast.
Likewise, Volvo announced that it would stop funding its EV unit, Polestar, and might even offload its 48pc stake on other shareholders, including China’s Geely. Last September, Volkswagen said it was cutting production of two of its flagship EV models, while in November, Ford said it was scaling back its battery plant in Michigan.
It looks like all those “well-paid green jobs” are going to take a little longer to arrive than anyone anticipated. As for the payback on huge sums various governments have “invested” in the industry, it looks like the returns on that money will take a while to come through as well.
There is nothing wrong with EVs themselves. They are often great as run-arounds for dense urban environments, and as long as the raw materials are sourced correctly, and the chargers are not powered by coal-burning generators, they are probably a little better for the environment than the petrol version.
If people want them, then that’s great. The trouble with the industry right now is that demand is falling because the vehicles cost far more than anyone expected, and what market there is will be captured by Chinese manufacturers such as BYD that can make vehicles far more cheaply than anyone in the West can. The result? A lot of government money will be wasted.
There is a lesson in the humiliating climbdown. State-led industrial strategies never work. Indeed, the failure of the drive into EV is a textbook example of everything that goes wrong.
First, it backs the wrong industries. No one really has any idea what products people might want in five or ten years time, which is why it is best to leave it to private companies and their investors to make their own bets, reap the rewards when they get it right, and bear the losses when they don’t.
Politicians and bureaucrats are no better at making those decisions, as usually a lot worse. Don’t believe me? Just ask consumers. Hertz in the US is disposing of the 20,000 EVs it bought with great fanfare in recent years, and is replacing them with petrol models, due to lack of demand. Over the past year, figures from the Society for Motor Manufacturers and Traders revealed a steep fall in EV interest from private buyers.
Next, the state over-invests. Even if there is a small market for EVs, there certainly wasn’t space for huge new industries in France, Germany, the US, or in a dozen smaller countries. The car industry was awash with over-capacity already, and that was before the Government started throwing billions at electric vehicle plants. All that happens is that prices collapse, and no one makes any money.
Finally, it distorts the market with subsidies. Governments start out spending a few billion on new EV factories, then they have to start subsidising the EVs so that people actually buy them, then they have to impose tariffs and quotas to stop imports from countries where other government have invested too much.
Finally, they have to pay out even more to keep alive the factories making a product that no one wants. It’s a vicious cycle, and once it starts it is very hard to stop.
The one relief for the UK is that our political and administrative class was too inept to pour even more money in, despite the best efforts of the former PM’s Theresa May and Boris Johnson to splurge a few tens of billions into the “race for EVs” and the endless warnings that we risked “getting left behind’”. We will be spared the worst of the pain ahead.
In reality, the volte-face on the electrification of the auto industry is underway. Major manufacturers have started to pull back, but all the grand projects for battery factories, for shiny new EV plants, and for charging infrastructure, will inevitably be scrapped very soon.
Billions of taxpayer’s money will have been wasted. We should draw the lesson from that, as bitter as it might prove. The Government never knows what the industries of the future will be – and should leave it to entrepreneurs and customers to work that out.
When the World Economic Forum rolled out their advertising campaign for The Great Reset it was supposed to be the victory lap for Globalism. Coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic, the subsequent global financial crisis unleashed a flood of government funny money that was supposed to buy our way to their perpetual prosperity.
It failed.
Don’t take my word for it. Take the word of one of the chief architects of the Great Reset, Klaus von Commie Schnitzel’s right hand man, Yuval Noah Harari.
Populist leaders are on the rise around the world, attacking the liberal global order. They haven't explained what will replace the order they have destroyed, and the result is the disorder, chaos and violence we are seeing today. pic.twitter.com/THRx2jzaKl
Spoken like the true authoritarian that he is, Harari can only see violence and chaos. He’s not wrong. The violence and chaos coming, however, have their roots in his attempts (or complicity) in trying to force, through violence, a global order on humanity which humanity doesn’t want.
This push towards violence, however, can stop tomorrow. All that has to happen is for cretins like Harari, Soros, Schwab, Gates, and all the people behind them, to truly accept the fact that they have failed and cut a deal with us.
If they do that we can minimize the violence on the horizon. But that’s not going to happen because they’ve already told us over and over that the abuse will continue until morale improves.
The impending chaos and violence is coming precisely because of Isaac Newton’s 3rd law, popularly summarized as “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
It’s not coming because we ‘don’t have any answers.’ We have plenty of answers, Harari and his ilk simply don’t like them.
For decades we met their violence with a kind of silent resignation as the cost of upsetting this system far outweighed the benefit of being the first 2nd lieutenant out of the foxhole in No Man’s Land. But the costs for so many today for going along to get along far outweigh the benefits accruing to them.
And that’s why the protests all across the West are intensifying.
The Great Reset project came at us too fast and we quickly saw it for what it was. While it was being rolled out through COVID most went along to be good neighbors. As I’ve argued in the past, acquiescence to the insane lockdown rules didn’t come from most people being sheep willingly herded into concentration happy camps. It came from a sense of wanting to be seen as cautious members of a community during a public crisis.
Of course there were some whose latent psychosis was triggered into being (*cough* Nassim Taleb *cough*), but the majority of people simply had their basic humanity weaponized against them.
Once the first wave of COVID ran its course and we saw how far they moved heaven and earth to silence actual cures for the virus, the Great Reset began morphing into the Great Awakening. And the evidence of people standing firm against any further degradation of our society for this nonsense grows daily.
The Great Diffusion?
Years ago I wrote about Everett Rogers’ Theory of Diffusion as it pertains to politics in general and the rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in specific.
Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation Theory is applicable to politics as well as products. The idea being that it takes around 16% adoption for a new technology, ideology, etc. to have the potential to become something bigger. This was made popular by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Tipping Point.
This is the curve I was implicitly invoking in my recent article about humans being more wolf than sheep.
We went from comfortable wolves in a pack we thought protected us from the dangers of the world to anxious, nervous wolves wondering which one of us would stand up to the psychotic alpha leading us towards an abyss.
The alpha continues towards that abyss thinking it’s a giant game of chicken and that we will stay under his rule out of fear.
Many of us are in either a state of shock and/or denial about what’s been going on. But, as history has shown us, we don’t need a majority of people to fundamentally change the course of history.
But at the heart of my observation is the following: Who will you really become when you have nothing left to lose? Or better yet, where’s your loss threshold before the real you bares your canines?
Because that’s literally all I was saying. We all have a limit. And the idea that because your limit isn’t as low as mine or some rando on the intarwebz makes you a sheeple is exactly the type of condescending and unearned sense of entitlement that drives the very ghouls that are convening at Davos this week to force us to rebuild our trust in them.
Looking around social media and the headlines of protests around the world by the working class, which the managerial class of over-educated midwits despise to the core of their being, you can see we’re very close to if not past the 16% tipping point.
This is why Davos has put on the full court press to accelerate the decline and fall of western civilization. We can all feel it. We’re a little over a month into 2024 and a year’s worth of geopolitics has occurred in that time.
They can feel the whole project slipping away and this has to be nipped in the bud before it spreads into what Rogers called the ‘Early Majority.’ To that end this is why they were so hard on “vaccine hesitancy,” and launched the wars on Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine.
It’s why now anyone to the right of Karl Marx himself is a “Fascist!” and is a member of the “hard right.” This is to dissuade people from identifying with outgroups and shame them into qualifying all of their dissension from their norm with, “I’m not a racist but…” or “I don’t agree with everything they say but… “
The Gap into Conflict
But also embedded in that article was Geoffrey Moore’s refinement of Rogers’ Curve to include the “Chasm.” Getting to 16% adoption isn’t enough. The new thing can get to 16% easily by simply opposing that which is dominant. This is what Harari was implying, that we are just ab-reacting to the opposite of them, by saying that we only reject the liberal order but have nothing to replace it with.
This is why the new idea or product has to then rebrand itself into something more universal. It’s not enough to be against globalism or the WEF, we have to also be for something better.
That becomes a decision point for a lot of people. It’s the moment when the established idea, brand, etc. wakes up to the threat and fights back. This is what the 16% chasm represents, that gulf between opposition and affirmation.
This is also what Davos and their ilk are truly exceptional at managing. They keep the Overton Window framed over irrelevant side issues to ensure that a new majority doesn’t “cross the 16% chasm,” by uniting over that better solution that doesn’t include them.
I’m calling this group they are afraid of, “The Radical Center.”
This is why AfD got to 16% in 2018 as the anti-Merkel party, but was easily neutralized when they didn’t become the true “Alternative for Germany” party. Once they did that and the current Scholz-led government failed to protect the German middle class during and since COVID, they’ve become a real threat.
A mixture of this rebranding and entrenched arrogance of the German political establishment is what led to AfD’s rise to the mid-20s in German polling. And it’s why despite a hastily-organized hit on them for an unconfirmed secret meeting in Postdam over deportation, they are still polling above 16%.
They are now the kind of threat that requires more drastic action, like banning them as a political party. That the German political establishment is even contemplating this tells you that they are fighting a rear-guard action against a movement that has grown far bigger than just AfD itself.
Gerrmany has crossed ‘The Chasm’ and a Radical Center is forming.
The ideas this embodies, a Germany for Germans that rejects globalism, inflation, endless taxation and war, in favor of localism, community and cohesion is far more immune to crude attack.
By the same token I’ve exhorted the libertarian movement in the US to become the movement of solutions; practical achievable solutions that speak to a true majority of Americans. And from there lead them to more localized solutions over time.
But because they have refused to do this, getting bogged down in being anti-Fed, anti-this, and anti-that, it leaves them still a fringe political group, easily neutralized by a simple meme:
This is why I’ve become disillusioned with where the libertarian movement has wound up. This is the essence of what Pete Quinones and I discussed in the recent podcast we did. It doesn’t mean I reject the philosophy or even the use of many libertarian critiques of central planning as useful filters, it means the philosophy isn’t enough to move the Overton Window in any practical political sense.
It’s why I voted for Trump twice, despite his many limitations, and will vote for him again if Davos can’t stop him from being on the Florida ballot. Even then, out of spite, I, like many, will simply write his name in.
And, guess what? He’ll still beat the LP candidate.
Accelerated Decrepitude
So, the Great Awakening has morphed, from Davos’ perspective, into a kind of Great Acceleration, where they feel the threat of our coming together across the false dyad of the Left/Right division to reject them outright.
This is why they will accelerate their plans to squelch all of those who leak away from their control. It’s why they hate Elon Musk so thoroughly for taking Twitter away from them. It’s why Bill Kristol believes it’s right to bar Tucker Carlson from coming back into the US after his visit to Russia.
That squelching was done to anger us into running to alternative internet ghettos like Gab and Mastodon and all the others.
It’s why they purposefully ruined Twitter under the previous management to drive us away and take away our voices through de-platforming Alex Jones and everyone else. How many people still refuse to go back to Twitter because of what happened in 2017? How many still make the “perfect be the enemy of the good” argument vis a vis Elon Musk’s reign at Twitter? *Cough* David Icke *Cough*
Sure the Rachel Maddow set is still enthralled every night, all 200,000 of them, but now they are the real media ghettos.
It was easy to go after Jones in 2017. It was easy to go after Gab later on. It was easy to see the alternative platforms like Rumble and Substack spin up to try and become the antipode to YouTube and WordPress, Locals for Patreon… etc.
I have nothing against these platforms, and have even tried some of them in the past, but I also recognize that they were allowed to become real to siphon people off into smaller tribes and build easily-ignored echo chambers. All to prevent us from crossing the chasm together to form the Radical Center.
And if one of these platforms gets too powerful? Well, I hope everyone has an archive of their Substacks. I also hope my fears on this are fully unfounded. But I’ve seen this movie before and I didn’t like it the first time I watched it.
Because, when voices capable of speaking across the false political divide of Left v Right get big enough, they have to be brought low. It’s fine for those on “the right” to be dismissed as kooks, dead-enders, isolationists, conspiracy theorists, MAGAtards, Nahtsees, etc.
Carnosine is a dipeptide found in meat. The highest concentrations of carnosine are found in your muscles, brain, central nervous system and gastrointestinal tract
If you’re a vegetarian or vegan, you will have lower levels of carnosine in your muscles. This is one reason why many strict vegans who do not properly compensate for this tend to have trouble building muscle
Carnosine binds to advanced lipoxidation endproducts (ALEs) that form from oxidized seed oils in your diet, making it a crucial aid in the detoxification of linoleic acid (LA)
Thanks to its ability to scavenge 4-hydroxynonenal (4HNE), carnosine is also protective against obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer’s disease, just to name a few
The best way to optimize your carnosine level is to eat organic grass fed beef. When it comes to carnosine supplements, your best bet is liposomal versions as they have the highest bioavailability
Carnosine is a dipeptide found in meat. It’s not found in any plant foods. Dipeptide means it’s made up of two amino acids, in this case beta-alanine and histidine. The highest concentrations of carnosine are found in your muscles, brain, central nervous system1 and gastrointestinal tract,2 which gives you an indication of its potential importance.
Unfortunately, it’s also one of the top 10 most common nutrient deficiencies, especially among vegans. If you’re a vegetarian or vegan, you will have lower levels of carnosine in your muscles. This is one reason why many strict vegans who do not properly compensate for this tend to have trouble building muscle.
Carnosine also binds to advanced lipoxidation endproducts (ALEs) that form from oxidized seed oils in your diet, making it a crucial aid in the detoxification of linoleic acid (LA).
Carnosine’s Physiological Roles
Carnosine has several physiological roles and benefits. For example, it:3
Provides athletic benefits — Approximately 99% of carnosine is found in muscle tissue where it facilitates lactic acid detoxification, improves muscle contraction and muscle relaxation and enhances endurancece
Alleviates diabetic nephropathy by protecting podocyte and mesangial cells4
Modulates energy metabolism in macrophages and microglia by restoring and/or enhancing the basal conditions
Has antioxidant properties and scavenges reactive oxygen species (ROS) and aldehydes created by peroxidation of fatty acid cell membranes during oxidative stress5
Regulates the activity of stem cells
Modulates glucose metabolism
Enhances the degradation and/or scavenging of nitric oxide (NO)
Promotes wound healing
Opposes glycation6
Slows down the aging process by prolonging the life of cells and preserving cellular homeostasis7
Regulates osmotic pressure
Modulates glutamate production and transport
Modulates brain metabolism
Chelates heavy metals8
Acts as a pH buffer9
Acts as a neurotransmitter
Protects olfactory receptor neurons in the elderly
Beef, Liposomal Carnosine and Precursors Are the Best Sources
Interestingly, a June 2023 paper10 in the medical journal Pharmaceuticals reviewed the science behind carnosine with the aim of developing new delivery systems for carnosine-based drugs. As noted in this paper:
“Because of its well-demonstrated multimodal pharmacodynamic profile, which includes anti-aggregant, antioxidant, and anti-inflammatory activities, as well as its ability to modulate the energy metabolism status in immune cells, this dipeptide has been investigated in numerous experimental models of diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, and at a clinical level.
The main limit for the therapeutic use of carnosine is related to its rapid hydrolysis … [This is the] reason why the development of new strategies, including the chemical modification of carnosine or its vehiculation into innovative drug delivery systems (DDS), aiming at increasing its bioavailability and/or at facilitating the site-specific transport to different tissues, is of utmost importance.”
Delivery systems currently in use or in development include intraperitoneal injections, intranasal sprays and oral administration of various nanoformulations. But while the drug industry is keen on figuring out how to profit from carnosine by making it into a drug, you certainly don’t need a drug to get these benefits.
Simply eating organic grass fed beef is one of the most efficient ways to raise your carnosine level.11 This is one of many reasons why cultured beef is not a viable substitute for real beef. Not only does fake beef lack carnosine but also B vitamins, retinol, long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, taurine, creatine and bioavailable forms of iron and zinc.12
Most carnosine supplements aren’t very effective either because the carnosine is rapidly broken down into its constituent amino acids by certain enzymes. Your body then reformulates those amino acids back to carnosine in your muscles.
An exception to this is liposomal carnosine, which appears to work quite well. Another alternative is to supplement with beta-alanine, which is the rate limiting amino acid in the formation of carnosine. According to a 2021 paper,13 daily intake of beta-alanine can raise the carnosine content of skeletal muscle by as much as 80%.
Carnosine Protects Against LA-Induced Oxidative Stress
One benefit not expounded upon in the Pharmaceuticals paper is carnosine’s ability to reduce LA-induced oxidative stress. While your body will slowly eliminate stored LA over time, provided you reduce your intake, carnosine can help reduce the oxidative damage caused by LA while your body is cleaning itself out. I take liposomal carnosine every day before meals to help detoxify LA.
The omega-6 fat LA is highly susceptible to oxidation, and as the fat oxidizes it breaks down into harmful sub-components such as ALEs and oxidized LA metabolites (OXLAMs). These ALEs and OXLAMs are what cause most of the damage.
Carnosine binds to ALEs like a magnet and acts as a sacrificial sink. It’s basically a substitute target for these profoundly damaging molecules. In this way, carnosine allows your body to excrete the ALEs from your body before they damage your mitochondria, DNA or proteins. (Another molecule that protects against LA-induced damage is carbon dioxide). The illustration below shows how carnosine works in this regard.
Carnosine May Be Protective Against a Wide Range of Diseases
A more detailed explanation of how carnosine protects against reactive oxygen species (ROS) and how that helps protect against oxidative stress-related pathologies is given in a 2021 paper in the journal Antioxidants:14
“A study that examined the effect of carnosine on oxidative stress in human kidney tubular epithelial (HK-2) cells indicated that carnosine decreased NADPH oxidase (NOX) 4 expression and increased total superoxide dismutase (T-SOD) activity, thus reducing the production of intracellular ROS, relieving the oxidative stress of cells, and ultimately inhibiting the mitochondrial pathway of apoptosis.
Ability of carnosine to protect against pathologies characterized by oxidative stress has been shown in a number of conditions … Carnosine changes the reactivity of superoxide anion by forming a charge-transfer complex with the superoxide radical and also by reducing the efficiency of hydroxyl radicals, creating a compound less reactive than the hydroxyl radical.
One of the mechanisms to protect organisms from oxidative stress is the chelation of transition metals, preventing them from participating in deleterious processes involving ROS … Interestingly, when comparing metals involved in free radical generation, carnosine was found to have a greater antioxidant activity coupled with copper than iron …
At physiological concentrations, carnosine directly reacts with superoxide anion similar to ascorbic acid. In physiological conditions, carnosine was found to reduce oxidative damage and to improve antioxidant activity of different antioxidative enzymes …
Experiments on aged rats showed that therapy with 250 mg/kg/carnosine per day significantly decreased oxidative stress and increased activity of antioxidative enzymes … In similar model of aged rats, carnosine increased liver vitamin E, which further demonstrates its importance in defending the organism from free radicals.
Rising data indicate that carnosine acts as a scavenger of reactive and cytotoxic carbonyl species including 4-hydroxynonenal (HNE). HNE is an aldehyde generated endogenously by lipid peroxidation of unsaturated fatty acids that act as ‘toxic second messengers,’ extending the harmful potential of free radicals.
HNE is considered an important biomarker of oxidative stress and accumulating data indicate that it may modulate signaling pathways of cell proliferation, apoptosis, and inflammation.”
How Carnosine Protects Against Alzheimer’s
As noted in the Pharmaceuticals paper,15 one of the pathologies that carnosine is protective against is Alzheimer’s disease. In my November 2021 interview with Tucker Goodrich, he explained the role of HNE, specifically, in Alzheimer’s, and why it’s so important to get rid of it.
“In heart failure, Alzheimer’s, and AMD [age-related macular degeneration], one of the things they see is an inability of the cell to produce enough energy. The mitochondria are getting damaged. HNE does that damage. It damages 24% of the proteins in the cell, primarily around energy production.
One of the ways your cells produce energy is they basically ferment glucose into pyruvate outside of the mitochondria. This is a perfectly normal part of metabolism and they produce something called pyruvate. A molecule called pyruvate dehydrogenase takes pyruvate into the mitochondria and converts it to acetyl-CoA so the mitochondria can burn it very efficiently for fuel.
Well, one of the things HNE does is it breaks pyruvate dehydrogenase, and they see this in Alzheimer’s where their cells are no longer able to produce enough energy. This is why your cells are dying in Alzheimer’s.
The beta amyloid plaques in Alzheimer’s disease are induced by HNE. There’s a great model that came out of Harvard a couple of years ago showing that.
Even the critical, the most important part of the mitochondria, complex 5, — ADP synthase — which is what takes all the energy coming from your mitochondria and turns it into ATP, which is what fuels the rest of your body — is damaged by HNE. This is a huge issue. There’s no more fundamental problem in aging and health than protein damage.”
Carnosine is the most effective scavenger of HNE, so optimizing your level can go a long way toward protecting against the HNE-induced damage that promotes Alzheimer’s.
Carnosine — A Promising Therapeutic for Obesity-Related Conditions
Elevated HNE has also been found in obese and diabetic patients,16 so there’s reason to suspect carnosine can be important in the treatment of these conditions as well. Another disease where elevated HNE plays a role is atherosclerosis. As noted in the 2021 Antioxidants paper:17
“… emerging studies have indicated that these reactive aldehydes are more than simply markers of oxidative stress.
Rather, it is suggested that these reactive species may play a significant pathogenic role in obesity-associated disorders such as insulin resistance and a carnosine analog alleviates the production or enhances the removal of reactive carbonyl species, providing promising new therapeutic compounds for cardiovascular and metabolic diseases related to obesity.”
A first look onto the door plug by NTSB investigators (Photo: NTSB) (Via AVHerald)
indi.ca
If anything symbolizes the suck of late-stage capitalism, it’s the ‘door’ blowing off a 737 MAX, sucking a boy’s clothes out, and falling into a schoolteacher’s backyard. These planes fucking suck, but people have to keep riding around in them because they’re somebody’s investment. The 737 MAX is simply too big to fail, despite being an obvious failure, over and over again.
America doesn’t make things anymore, and neither does Boeing. They just rebrand, reboot, and loot the corpse of the 20th century until it’s unrecognizable. The Boeing 737 is a 50-year-old airframe that some marketing idiot just slapped the word MAX on, like it’s a flavor of Mountain Dew. They might as well call it the 737 EXTREME, which is the experience of riding one. The thing has crashed itself, blown out doors midair, and the engine can melt itself if the pilot isn’t careful. These are not isolated problems, they are simply the downstream effects of having stupid fucking ideas in the first place.
Take the 737 MAX crashing itself, which I’ve covered at length. The management decided to put a giant modern engine on a low 1960s airframe and it just didn’t fit. Just look at how squashed these modern engines look on such an old plane, and how high up the MAX engine is on the wing. This is what ‘financial’ engineering looks like.
To make the 737 MAX ‘work, they had to put the engine way forward and up on the plane, and it doesn’t work! This fundamentally changes the plane’s center of gravity and makes it ‘pop a wheelie’ in certain conditions, ie stall out and crash. To ‘solve’ this problem they wrote a software ‘fix’ that forced the nose down, involuntarily. That ‘fix’ got stuck and crashed multiple planes, in absolutely horrifying dips and dives that eventually grounded the whole fleet (temporarily), and hundreds of people (permanently). The problem was not the software or the engine, it was putting one century’s engine on another century’s airframe, so MBAs could save a bit of money. It, of course, cost more money in the long run, but who gives a shit? They got their bonuses and only failed upwards, while the planes they built kept crashing.
Now take the new problem. ‘Doors’ flying off midair. The 737 was initially designed to carry just over 100 people but has been stretched and contorted to fit double that, in multiple configurations. One of those configurations has a ‘false’ emergency exit (a ‘plug’), which is what recently blew out midair. Now, who is responsible for this part? Well, some outsourced company named Spirit Aero made the thing and Boeing assembled it, so effectively nobody. Which is the bigger problem underneath all of this.
As I wrote about Boeing’s Culture Crash, Henry Stonecipher destroyed Boeing as an engineering company in the 2000s. Like the rest of the American economy, he prioritized outsourcing in order to make short-term gains, leading to the destruction of Boeing as an engineering company. Quite intentionally. As Stonecipher said in 2004, “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm. It is a great engineering firm, but people invest in a company because they want to make money.”
Under Stonecipher, Boeing fired engineers, outsourced production, and the company has devoted 92% of cashflow to buybacks and dividends since 2014. They’re not actually in the plane business anymore, they’re in the branding and assembly business, and now these planes are disassembling midair and killing the branding. Because this is what happens when you have MBAs designing planes instead of engineers. They make good money and shitty planes. It was the triumph of short-term thinking, and only now do we get the long-term reckoning. As predicted. As Stan Sorscher, a Boeing physicists and union leader said in 2002:
In 2002, Sorscher, who had started working for the union full time, made his case to a Wall Street analyst in Seattle, arguing that bottom-line business models did not apply to building airplanes. The analyst cut him off. “You think you’re different,” he said, according to Sorscher. “This business model works for everyone. It works for ladies’ garments, for running shoes, for hard drives, for integrated circuits, and it will work for you.”
Taken aback, Sorscher said: “Let’s build an airliner with this business model. If it works, you and everyone who looks like you will be happy. And if I’m right, then we’ll all be very unhappy.”
This is the suck of late-stage capitalism. Boeing is a symptom of what Jamie Merchant calls“the abolition of the market without planning.” When you have companies that are too big to fail, regulators in a revolving door with industry, and government bailouts for the inevitable failures, you get central unplanning. You get planes crashing out of the sky and then going back on the market until their doors fly out, because what the fuck is anybody going to do about it? There are no actual rules to capitalism, it’s just rule by capital.
In any sane market, the 737 MAX wouldn’t be made, because it’s stupid, has wasted time and money, and kills people. But airplanes are a global duopoly, and a duopoly is just a monopoly with two orifices to go fuck yourself in. When Airbus slapped a new engine on an old airframe, Boeing just did the same thing. There’s no competition here, just shoddy cloning.
In any sane market, this product would not continue to be sold, after proving so fatally flawed (literally). But they keep selling it! They just keep patching up the Frankenplane and it keeps on lumbering from disaster to disaster, with different parts falling off or malfunctioning. Regulators go along with this, because they’re as corrupted as everything else in the American government. Indeed, in response to another design flaw (the deicing system melting the engine if left on), Boeing simply applied for an ‘exemption’. That’s the gall of these people. They think themselves above both market forces and government. Even though the planes are crashing, the oligarchs are high-flying.
Boeing was the quintessential American company, and in it you can see what America has become. A manufacturing powerhouse turned a financialized laughingstock. Boeing doesn’t make planes, it just makes money, and the same could be said about the American economy. In the short-run this is an orgy for oligarchs, but in the long-run it’s ruin. As Boeing dissident Dr. L.J. Hart-Smith said in 2001, “A strong case is made that it will not always be possible to make more and more profit out of less and less product and that, worse, there is a strong risk of going out of business directly as a result of this policy.”
However, it seems that not just Boeing but the 737 MAX will never go out of business, but that doesn’t make the risk disappear. It just accumulated upwards. The problem simply moves from the scale of a bad door, to a bad company, to a bad nation, to a bad Empire. The United States keeps having and bailing out bad company after bad company and all of that risk keeps piling up on the national balance sheet. They can keep doing this as long as the rest of their White Empire keeps paying tribute (called buying treasuries), but Boeing also makes shitty military equipment and the Empire itself is crumbling all over.
At some point, the deficits will add up, the debts will come due, and America and its whole White Empire will undergo what engineers called ‘Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly.’ This seems impossible but one can’t imagine the side of a plane falling off, until it does. This will happen the way Hemingway described bankruptcy, ‘gradually, then suddenly.’ Like the door blowing out a Boeing 737, an airframe from an air empire that peaked in 1967, and has only been cannibalizing itself ever since.
On Saturday night Washington launched 120 cruise missiles at what was declared to be the positions of pro-Iranian Shiite groups. This was intended as retribution for over 167 attacks on US military bases in Syria, Iraq and, most recently, Jordan, plus attacks on ships in the Red Sea. The attacks were very loosely attributed to unknown “Islamic Resistance Forces” (not an actual name of any armed group or groups) that the Washingtonians seem to have simply dreamt up. What provoked this most recent launch of a volley of cruise missiles was the death of three US servicemen, plus a much larger number of wounded, from an attack on the curiously named al-Tower logistical base in Jordan, close to the Syrian and Iraqi borders.
Why was this particular incident the one to provoke such a reaction? We don’t know. We also don’t know why the attack was attributed to some Iran-associated organization rather to the one that actually took responsibility for it — a Sunni group associated with Qatar. That’s like blaming Mormons for something that Jehovah’s Witnesses said they did. This may seem like a very odd thing to do, but only until one realizes that this is absolutely typical of the Washingtonians. What follows is an article I published in March of 2016 — eight whole years ago. As you read it, you will notice that nothing at all has changed.
There are numerous tactics available to those who aim to make problems worse while pretending to solve them, but misdirection is always a favorite. The reason to want to make problems worse is that problems are profitable — for someone. And the reason to pretend to be solving them is that causing problems, then making them worse, makes those who profit from them look bad.
In the international arena, this type of misdirection tends to take on a farcical aspect. The ones profiting from the world’s problems are the members of the US foreign policy and military establishments, the defense contractors and the politicians around the world, and especially in the EU, who have been bought off by them. Their tactic of misdirection is conditioned by a certain quirk of the American public, which is that it doesn’t concern itself too much with the rest of the world. The average member of the American public has no idea where various countries are, can’t tell Sweden from Switzerland, thinks that Iran is full of Arabs and can’t distinguish any of the countries that end in “-stan”. And so a handy trick has evolved, which amounts to the following dictum: “Always Attack the Wrong Country.”
Need some examples? After 9/11, which, according to the official story (which is probably nonsense) was carried out by “suicide bombers” (some of them, amusingly, still alive today) who were mostly from Saudi Arabia, the US chose to retaliate by attacking… Saudi Arabia? No, Afghanistan and Iraq.
When Arab Spring erupted (because a heat wave in Russia drove up wheat prices) the obvious place to concentrate efforts, to avoid a seriously bad outcome for the region, was Egypt — the most populous Arab country and an anchor for the entire region. And so the US and NATO decided to attack… Egypt? No, Libya.
When things went south in the Ukraine, whose vacillating government couldn’t make up its mind whether it wanted to remain within the Customs Union with Russia, its traditional trading partner, or to gamble on signing an agreement with the EU based on vague (and since then broken) promises of economic cooperation, the obvious place to go and try to fix things was the Ukraine. And so the US and the EU decided to fix the Ukraine problem by putting pressure on Russia, even though Russia is not particularly broken. Russia was not amused; nor is it a country to be trifled with, and so in response the Russians inflicted some serious pain on… the Washington establishment? No, farmers within the EU; that was more profitable. The Russians can play such games too.
Who was at fault became exceedingly clear once the Ukrainians that managed to get into power (including some very nasty neo-Nazis) started to violate the rights of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking majority, including staging some massacres, in turn causing a large chunk of the country to hold referendums and vote to secede. And so the US and the EU decided to fix things by continuing to put pressure on… the Ukraine? No, still on Russia.
When Russia started insisting on a political rather than a military resolution to the crisis in the Ukraine, and helped negotiate the Minsk agreements together with the Ukraine, France and Germany, a similar thing happened. These agreements obligated the Ukrainian government to pass constitutional reforms to grant autonomy to its Russian regions. The Ukrainian government refused to abide by these agreements. As a result, the US and the EU decided to put pressure on… the Ukrainian government? No, on the Russian government,again.
When a nasty terrorist group calling itself ISIS and composed of Islamic Salafi/Takfiri extremists started to seize power in large parts of Iraq, and then spread to Syria, something had to be done about it. These extremists were being financed by Turkey and Saudi Arabia with plenty of help from the CIA and the Pentagon. And so the US and NATO decided to put some pressure… on Turkey and Saudi Arabia? Or on themselves, perhaps? No, on Syria.
In response to all this foolishness, Russia decided to actually go and fix something that was broken: Syria. And now Syria is on the mend, and members of the Central Misdirectorate in Washington are left scratching their heads: someone actually fixing something? How is that even possible?
So far so good. But this method of pretending to be solving problems by making them worse has some definite downsides.
For one thing, eventually even the dimmest, most geographically challenged bulbs in the American general population might start to get a clue that such activities are an unproductive waste of their scarce tax dollars, and then they might start refusing to vote for the establishment candidates. Then it would becomes hard to continue with the misdirecting because the people doing the misdirecting would be voted out, and (horror of horrors!) somebody who might actually try to fix a problem or two might get voted in. But that’s not terribly likely because causing problems and then making them worse is so profitable that those who are profiting always have the surplus funds to buy whatever votes they need.
More significantly, continually making problems worse by attacking the wrong country tends to eventually make the sheer number problems get completely out of hand. Take the massive terror attack in Brussels, down the road from NATO headquarters, for which ISIS took credit. In recent years, Europe has been experiencing a large-scale influx of people from the Middle East and North Africa, who have been forced to flee their native lands because of all the previous acts of misdirection, and a fair number of these people are ISIS terrorists. And so, to protect itself, NATO is planning to fight ISIS… in Europe? No, in Syria. Also, it is well known that the influx into Europe has been orchestrated by Turkey. In response, the EU has decided to put pressure on Turkey? No, give billions of euros to Turkey and tell Turkey that it might at some point be welcome to join the EU. Makes perfect sense.
This pattern of misdirection has an overall momentum that, over time, becomes harder and harder to break. It starts out as just one group of plutocrats doing incredibly vile, underhanded but profitable things; later on, an even bigger group of plutocrats turns out to be doing equally vile but now completely idiotic, self-defeating, embarrassing things; and right near the end a really huge group of plutocrats does things that are absolutely suicidal — but they can’t stop themselves. For example, the Biden clan can’t bring itself to shut down the southern border because then it would lose all the bribe money coming to it from the Mexican narco cartels.
The Most Revolutionary Act 