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Australians Aren’t Allowed To Know If There Are American Nukes In Australia

Posted by M. C. on February 16, 2023

So what is the influence the US has that causes countries to make themselves sacrificial pawns in it’s great game? Promises of (US taxpayer supplied) money, power, threats, all of the above? I suspect in a nuke war with China, OZ will be gone in the first 5 minutes.

I used to think AU would be a nice place to live. But now – Carbon tax disaster, forced lockdowns, beaten in the street and arrested for not wearing a mask now a self painted target on it’s back.

Caitlin Johnstone

https://open.substack.com/pub/caitlinjohnstone/p/australians-arent-allowed-to-know?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android

The US government is permitted to have nuclear weapons in Australia. What’s more, Australians are not permitted to know whether or not this is happening. What’s more, not even Australia’s elected senators are permitted to know whether this is happening. It’s assumed to be none of Australia’s business whether there are foreign nuclear weapons in Australia.

This was clarified during a Senate estimates hearing on Wednesday, when Greens senators were condescendingly admonished by the Australian foreign minister for the very normal and appropriate attempt to clarify the government’s policy regarding the presence of US armageddon weapons on Australian soil.

ABC News reports:

During a Senate estimates hearing on Wednesday Greens senators sought details on whether visiting American aircraft such as the B-52s operating out of the Top End are ever nuclear armed.

The committee was told the United States had a longstanding policy of “neither confirming or denying” the presence of nuclear weapons under its practice of maintaining global operational unpredictability. 

US bomber aircraft have been visiting Australia since the early 1980s, with nuclear-capable B-52s and B2 Sprits regularly operating out of northern Australia.

Defence Department secretary Greg Moriarty said the “stationing of nuclear weapons” in Australia was prohibited under the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, but the treaty did not prevent visits by the US bombers.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong was bizarrely hostile toward Senator David Shoebridge’s line of questioning on US nuclear weapons in Australia, angrily accusing him of trying to “make a political point” and acting in a way that is not “responsible or fair to the Australian community,” just for seeking answers beyond stock “the US can neither confirm nor deny” responses on this extremely important matter.

So there you have it. The US does indeed have permission to bring weapons into Australia which can turn the nation into a nuclear target, and Australians not only have no say in the matter but are also not allowed to know anything about it. It’s actually kind of rude and offensive for you to even ask.

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Don’t Bow Down To A Dictatorial Government. America Is A Prison Disguised As Paradise | ZeroHedge

Posted by M. C. on February 16, 2023

As McGoohan commented in 1968, “At this moment individuals are being drained of their personalities and being brainwashed into slaves… As long as people feel something, that’s the great thing. It’s when they are walking around not thinking and not feeling, that’s tough. When you get a mob like that, you can turn them into the sort of gang that Hitler had.”

You want to be free? Remove the blindfold that blinds you to the Deep State’s con game, stop doping yourself with government propaganda, and break free of the political chokehold that has got you marching in lockstep with tyrants and dictators.

Tyler Durden's Photo

BY TYLER DURDEN

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/dont-bow-down-dictatorial-government-america-prison-disguised-paradise

“If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They’ll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government.”

 – President Dwight D. Eisenhower

The government wants us to bow down to its dictates.

It wants us to buy into the fantasy that we are living the dream, when in fact, we are trapped in an endless nightmare of servitude and oppression.

Indeed, with every passing day, life in the American Police State increasingly resembles life in the dystopian television series The Prisoner.

First broadcast 55 years ago in the U.S., The Prisoner—described as “James Bond meets George Orwell filtered through Franz Kafka”—confronted societal themes that are still relevant today: the rise of a police state, the loss of freedom, round-the-clock surveillance, the corruption of government, totalitarianism, weaponization, group think, mass marketing, and the tendency of human beings to meekly accept their lot in life as prisoners in a prison of their own making.

Perhaps the best visual debate ever on individuality and freedom, The Prisoner centers around a British secret agent who abruptly resigns only to find himself imprisoned in a virtual prison disguised as a seaside paradise with parks and green fields, recreational activities and even a butler.

While luxurious, the Village’s inhabitants have no true freedom, they cannot leave the Village, they are under constant surveillance, all of their movements tracked by militarized drones, and stripped of their individuality so that they are identified only by numbers.

“I am not a number. I am a free man,” is the mantra chanted in each episode of The Prisoner, which was largely written and directed by Patrick McGoohan, who also played the title role of Number Six, the imprisoned government agent.

Throughout the series, Number Six is subjected to interrogation tactics, torture, hallucinogenic drugs, identity theft, mind control, dream manipulation, and various forms of social indoctrination and physical coercion in order to “persuade” him to comply, give up, give in and subjugate himself to the will of the powers-that-be.

Number Six refuses to comply.

In every episode, Number Six resists the Village’s indoctrination methods, struggles to maintain his own identity, and attempts to escape his captors. “I will not make any deals with you,” he pointedly remarks to Number Two, the Village administrator a.k.a. prison warden. “I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.”

Yet no matter how far Number Six manages to get in his efforts to escape, it’s never far enough.

Watched by surveillance cameras and other devices, Number Six’s attempts to escape are continuously thwarted by ominous white balloon-like spheres known as “rovers.”

Still, he refuses to give up.

“Unlike me,” he says to his fellow prisoners, “many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment, and will die here like rotten cabbages.”

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Feb. 19: We Need a Huge Rage Against the War Machine – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on February 16, 2023

https://original.antiwar.com/Rick_Sterling/2023/02/15/feb-19-we-need-a-huge-rage-against-the-war-machine/

by Rick Sterling

We urgently need to spark a mass mobilization antiwar movement in North America. There have been good antiwar demonstrations in recent months, but they have been very limited. We need to rapidly expand tenfold.

The Feb. 19 Rage Against the War Machine initiative, which is organized by a diverse group of antiwar forces, could do just that. The demands and overall speaker list are very good.

For example Demand 1 is “Not one more penny for War in Ukraine.” They explain “The Democrats and Republicans have armed Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars in weapons and military aid. The war has killed tens of thousands, displaced millions, and is pushing us toward nuclear WW3. Stop funding the war.”

Demand 2 is “Negotiate Peace.” They explain, “The US instigated the war in Ukraine with a coup on its democratically-elected government in 2014, and then sabotaged a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine in March. Pursue an immediate ceasefire and diplomacy to end the war.”

The speakers list contains many eloquent voices for peace and against a militarist foreign policy. There are former members of Congress including Cynthia McKinney, Tulsi Gabbard, Dennis Kucinich, and Ron Paul. There are peace activists such as Anne Wright and David Swanson. There are journalists such as Chris Hedges, Garland Nixon, Scott Horton, Max Blumenthal, and Kim Iversen. Former Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein will be there. So will Dan McKnight from the veterans group “Bring our troops home.” And there are many more speakers.

Most of those who support the Rally believe it is crucial to broaden the movement and that means allying with others who may have different views on other issues.

The Rage rally focus is on ending the Ukraine war, disbanding NATO and stopping the slide toward nuclear Armageddon. Should they have included other issues such as abortion, trans rights, gay rights, immigrant rights? I have helped organize rallies where those issues were included, but believe it is a mistake to insist on this. The antiwar movement needs to quickly reach way beyond the Left. That means vastly broadening our reach and uniting with some people who think differently about other issues.

The capitalist system is flexible. Having women, people of color and nonconforming gender individuals in key positions does not threaten the system. The war machine continues, as does the grotesque income inequality, severe poverty and institutional racism.

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US Officials Now Say Chinese “Spy Balloon” Flew Over The US Accidentally

Posted by M. C. on February 15, 2023

But the war party got a lot of good press. So all those $half million sidewinders were worth it. No matter how stupid this makes us look.

Caitlin Johnstone

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/us-officials-now-say-chinese-spy?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The Washington Post has a weird new article out citing multiple anonymous US officials saying that the Chinese “spy balloon” we’ve been hearing about for the last two weeks was never intended for a surveillance mission over North America at all.

The article is titled “U.S. tracked China spy balloon from launch on Hainan Island along unusual path,” and throughout it alternates between the objective journalistic terms “suspected spy balloon” and “suspected Chinese surveillance balloon” and the US government’s terms “spy balloon” and “airborne surveillance device”. There is at this time no publicly available evidence that the balloon which was famously shot down on February 4th was in fact an instrument of Chinese espionage; the Chinese government has said that the balloon was a civilian meteorological airship that got blown off course, and the Pentagon’s own assessment is that a Chinese spy balloon would not “create significant value added over and above what the PRC is likely able to collect through things like satellites in Low Earth Orbit.”

What makes the article so weird is that it actually contains claims which substantiate Beijing’s assertion that this was in fact a balloon that got blown off course, yet it keeps repeating the unevidenced claim that it was a “spy balloon”. Here’s an excerpt, emphasis mine:

By the time a Chinese spy balloon crossed into American airspace late last month, U.S. military and intelligence agencies had been tracking it for nearly a week, watching as it lifted off from its home base on Hainan Island near China’s south coast.

U.S. monitors watched as the balloon settled into a flight path that would appear to have taken it over the U.S. territory of Guam. But somewhere along that easterly route, the craft took an unexpected northern turn, according to several U.S. officials, who said that analysts are now examining the possibility that China didn’t intend to penetrate the American heartland with their airborne surveillance device.

The balloon floated over Alaska’s Aleutian Islands thousands of miles away from Guam, then drifted over Canada, where it encountered strong winds that appear to have pushed the balloon south into the continental United States, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive intelligence.

Paul Kane @pkcapitol

That 1st balloon seemed designed to spy on US assets in Guam, maybe Hawaii — but weather currents sent it way north to Alaska & beyond. Rare time when @capitalweather teams up with intel experts @nakashimae @shaneharris for big scoop. washingtonpost.comU.S. tracked China spy balloon from launch on Hainan Island along unusual pathThe errant path of the large Chinese spy balloon across Alaska and the continental United States may have been caused by unusual weather conditions that pulled it off course.11:19 PM ∙ Feb 14, 2023254Likes114Retweets

The article really reads like someone trying to reconcile two contradictory narratives, claiming that although China didn’t intend to send the balloon over the United States, it decided to seize the opportunity to surveil US nuclear sites while it was there anyway.

“Its crossing into U.S. airspace was a violation of sovereignty and its hovering over sensitive nuclear sites in Montana was no accident, officials said, raising the possibility that even if the balloon were inadvertently blown over the U.S. mainland, Beijing apparently decided to seize the opportunity to try to gather intelligence,” write the article’s authors Ellen Nakashima, Shane Harris, and Jason Samenow.

“Intelligence analysts are unsure whether the apparent deviation was intentional or accidental, but are confident it was intended for surveillance, most likely over U.S. military installations in the Pacific,” they write.

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The Largest Environmental Disaster in US History? – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on February 15, 2023

Not Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who made an appearance on Monday and blamed the country’s infrastructure problems on COVID and didn’t say a word about the derailments. He preferred to complain that there were too many white men in the construction business.

(Railroad) Money Talks. In case you didn’t already know, the transportation department is not meant to serve you.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/02/no_author/the-largest-environmental-disaster-in-us-history/

With all of the Chyna balloons and UFOs going around, unless you live in East Palestine, Ohio or if you consume a lot of independent news, you probably don’t know that the US is currently experiencing what may be the largest ecological disaster in its history.

And I’m not talking about the fake Climate Change catastrophism promoted by the World Economic Forum, I’m talking about the ~100,000 gallons or 1,000,000 pounds of vinyl chloride leaked, spilled and burned, due to a train derailment in this rural town of 5,000 people, where acid rain and phosgene is expected to decimate a wide swathe of the region’s ecology. The devastation will likely force migrations of people, many of whom will get cancer later on. This is an American Chernobyl.

Dioxins result whenever chlorinated organics like vinyl chloride are burned. Dioxins are degraded slowly in the environment, with a half-life of 25-100 years in the soil. They cause cancers, reproductive harm, damage the immune system and they disrupt hormones.

The toxic plume of airborne hydrochloric acid and dioxin from the East Palestine “controlled burn” has a radius of over 200 miles encompassing Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland and Toronto. For the past week, it’s been raining down over some of the most fertile farmland in the United States, killing farm animals and aquatic life.

The entire Ohio River Basin is affected, where over 30 million people or 10% of the US population lives, including the metropolitan areas of Louisville KY, Cincinnati OH, Indianapolis, IN and Nashville, TN. The Ohio River, alone provides drinking water to over 5 million people. And it drains into the Mississippi, affecting all those downstream.

It’s not known what caused the derailment but security camera footage taken 20 miles away from the scene of the accident in Salem, OH shows sparks and flames shooting beneath one of the cars. Hot box detectors should have triggered the emergency brake but that doesn’t appear to have happened. The NTSB is investigating the trains data and audio recordings and the hot box detectors along the route.

The national news is not covering this event and there is a major cover-up in progress. Last week, Evan Lambert, an independent news reporter was arrested for simply and unobtrusively reporting on the derailment.

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Airforce Spent Millions To Shoot Down A Failed U.S. Weather Balloon – Biden Is Happy It Did So – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on February 15, 2023

So it looks like the airforce sent up an AWACS surveillance plane, a tanker and an F-22, the most expensive fighter plane ever, to fire a $400,000 Sidewinder missile to take down a failed weather balloon.

But it brought Biden some better press than the Chinese weather balloon disaster did. So there is the real reason for doing it.

The same people that are stymied by weather balloons want to go to war with China and Russia simultaneously.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/02/no_author/airforce-spent-millions-to-shot-down-a-failed-u-s-weather-balloon-biden-is-happy-it-did-so/

Moon of Alabama

Yesterday the U.S. airforce shot down another weather balloon:

The Pentagon said it shot down an unidentified object over frozen waters around Alaska on Friday at the order of President Biden, less than a week after a U.S. fighter jet brought down a Chinese spy balloon over the Atlantic in an episode that increased tensions between Washington and Beijing.

This ‘unidentfied object’ was much smaller than the previous balloon.

Three U.S. officials said that as of Friday evening, the government did not know who owned or sent the object seen above Alaska, which, like the Chinese balloon last week, was shot down by an F-22 fighter jet using a Sidewinder air-to-air missile.Several officials said they believed the object shot down Friday was a balloon, but a Defense Department official said it broke into pieces when it hit the frozen sea, which added to the mystery of whether it was indeed a balloon, a drone or something else.

Mr. Kirby said that the object was “much, much smaller than the spy balloon that we took down last Saturday” and that “the way it was described to me was roughly the size of a small car, as opposed to the payload that was like two or three buses.”

The Chinese weather balloon taken down earlier had likely nothing to do with spying. The crazy disinformation and policitics around it are just propaganda. There were antennas on Chinese weather ballon but all weather balloons are carrying radiosondes to send down whatever they find.

After their measuring tasks are done weather balloons are supposed to fly higher until the pressure within the balloon is much higher than the thin air surrounding it. In consequence the balloon will rip open and its radiosonde and debris will come down on a small parachute. There is usually an address on these and a request to send them back for reuse. In case you find one please do so.

Sometimes the mechanism sending the balloon higher will fail. The balloon will then just follow the winds until something happens that brings it down.

That may well have happened to the Chinese weather balloon  as well as the the weather balloon sent up by the National Weather Service from its measuring stations in Kotzebue or Noma in northwest Alaska.

Dan Satterfield @wildweatherdan – 21:41 UTC · Feb 10, 2023I back forecasted the latest “Balloon” shoot down in AK. Based on the location and time, it tracks back to near the Kotzebue NWS Rawinsonde site. Did we shoot down an NWS Weather balloon?? There is no data for the 12Z launch from that site and all the rest worked. #Chinaballoon

If not, then it goes back to the Bering Sea and then to NE Russia.

Also possible they did not launch a balloon at Kotzebue this morning at 12Z.

bigger

A rawinsonde is by the way a combination of wind sensors and radiosonde:

rawinsonde – An upper-air sounding that includes determination of wind speeds and wind directions.Historically, wind data were obtained by tracking a balloon-borne radiosonde with a radio direction finder. Contemporary methods include measuring position or radiosonde velocity from a global positioning system or Loran radio navigation signals.

Another weather station is in Nome, Alaska, which is in the same area as Kotzebue.

Dan Satterfield @wildweatherdan – 21:54 UTC · 10 Feb 2023Nome sounding stopped at 100 mb today. It could be the NOME rawinsonde balloon had issues.

If the measuring stopped at 100 millibar air pressure the balloon failed to rise further up into thinner air.

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Ohio Train Disaster: How Corruption and Greed Created Catastrophe, w/ David Sirota. Plus, Hawley’s New Social Media Law | SYSTEM UPDATE #41

Posted by M. C. on February 15, 2023

Parental rights are sacrosanct, except when they are not. This proves Doug Casey’s opinion that politicians want not to help you but to control you.

https://rumble.com/v29jr3e-system-update-show-41.html

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Of Course The Sanctions on Russia Backfired — Governments Never Seem To Learn

Posted by M. C. on February 14, 2023

https://rumble.com/v29ecpc-of-course-the-sanctions-on-russia-backfired-governments-never-seem-to-learn.html

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Two Cheers for Matt Gaetz’s Ukraine War Resolution – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on February 14, 2023

https://original.antiwar.com/thomas-knapp/2023/02/13/two-cheers-for-matt-gaetzs-ukraine-war-resolution/

by Thomas Knapp

On February 9, US Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and ten Republican co-sponsors introduced a resolution “expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the United States must end its military and financial aid to Ukraine, and urges [sic] all combatants to reach a peace agreement.”

When Matt Gaetz is right (which really isn’t very often), he’s right.

If two authoritarian regimes – and make no mistake, Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s gang has proven itself just as violent and authoritarian as Vladimir Putin’s – want to fight, there’s not much the supposedly “democratic” US regime can or should do to stop them. Not our circus. Not our monkeys.

The resolution notes, at length, the financial and military aid the US government has delivered, or pledged to deliver, to Ukraine. Every dime of that money comes out of Americans’ pockets, either through taxation or as a future extortion demand to pay off new debt.

Every bullet, bomb, artillery shell, and rocket delivered or pledged is explicitly intended to inflict violent death on men and women most of whom almost certainly would rather not be where they are or doing what they’re doing. And every bullet, bomb, artillery shell, and rocket delivered or pledged has a non-trivial chance of inflicting violent death on innocent civilian non-combatants.

The resolution does cite one, and only one, positive effect of US military aid to Ukraine: It has “severely depleted United States stockpiles, weakening United States readiness in the event of” the US government deciding to go inflict violent death on other, future battlefields.

Even assuming a “legitimate defense” function for government – which is sort of like believing the guy mugging you on the street might help you out if a second mugger shows up – those stockpiles could be “depleted” by 90% without impeding such a “legitimate” function, as it would still leave the US regime well-equipped to fend off any likely threat to you (or, more to the point, its own power), as opposed to “going abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” But hey, baby steps, right?

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Tanks for Nuttin’ – TomDispatch.com

Posted by M. C. on February 14, 2023

Why do Ukrainians killed by Russia generate headlines, while deaths attributable to Mexican drug cartels — 100,000 Americans from drug overdoses annually – are treated as mere statistics?

https://tomdispatch.com/tanks-for-nuttin/

Andrew Bacevich

The name of the game in Ukraine seems to be escalation, not just in the fighting (with a major Russian offensive expected soon), but in weaponry, too. Only recently, after initially refusing, President Biden agreed to send advanced American M-1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine (partly to push Germany to dispatch its own advanced Leopard 2 tanks and other European countries to do the same). And that, sadly enough, represents just another step up the ladder to… well, who knows quite what.

The Ukrainians are now demanding that the U.S. (and so, as with those tanks, other NATO allies) supply its air force with F-16 jet fighters. In an unsettling analog to the German tank accord, the Polish government seemed to agree to deliver some of its F-16s to the Ukrainians, with one proviso: that NATO (that is, the U.S.) agree to do the same. In Washington, those planes had been considered a “red line” not to be crossed and not so long ago President Biden offered a flat “no” to the very idea — as he had, once upon a time, with those tanks, too. In other words, in a phrase now in use at the Pentagon, he “M1-ed” the idea. As it happens, sentiment at the Pentagon already seems to be shifting, suggesting that the president’s F-16 position may soon prove to be so yesterday. Only recently, in fact, the U.S. agreed to send Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bombs that would double the range of that country’s rocket batteries, though like the tanks and possible planes actual delivery remains in an undefined future.

Here’s a question to consider: Once promises are indeed made to deliver those F-16s, what can Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky demand next? It’s worth recalling that, in 1994 in a remarkable move, the Ukrainians returned to Russia the massive nuclear arsenal left there when the Soviet Union collapsed. It had briefly made the new nation into the third-largest nuclear power on Earth. The Ukrainians did so, however, only after the Russians agreed “to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.” No small irony there, right?

Is it too farfetched, then, to imagine that, once those F-16s are assured, Zelensky could begin demanding tactical nuclear weapons? After all, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his confederates have already muttered more than once about using such weaponry against Ukraine.

I know, I know, that’s certainly one wild jump too far, except that so much has proven unnervingly too far in the first major European war since World War II ended. As TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author of the remarkable new book On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century, suggests today, perhaps nothing is inconceivable when what’s at stake is “civilization” itself (as defined in both Moscow and Washington). Tom

Tanks for Nuttin’

Is Civilization at Stake in Ukraine?

BY ANDREW BACEVICH

“To defend civilization, defeat Russia.” Writing in the unfailingly bellicose Atlantic, an American academic of my acquaintance recently issued that dramatic call to arms. And lest there be any confusion about the stakes involved, the image accompanying his essay depicted Russian President Vladimir Putin with a Hitler mustache and haircut.

Cast Putin as the latest manifestation of the Führer and the resurrection of Winston Churchill can’t be far behind. And, lo, more than a few observers have already begun depicting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as the latest reincarnation of America’s favorite British prime minister.

These days, it may be Western-supplied missiles downing “kamikaze drones” rather than Spitfires tangling with Messerschmitts over southern England, but the basic scenario remains intact. In the skies above Ukraine and on the battlefields below, the “finest hour” of 1940 is being reenacted. Best of all, we know how this story ends — or at least how it’s supposed to end: with evil vanquished and freedom triumphant. Americans have long found comfort in such simplified narratives. Reducing history to a morality play washes away annoying complexities. Why bother to think when the answers are self-evident? 

A Case of Whataboutism?

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