People told me at that time that my penthouse apartment was selling for less than a ground floor apartment, which would be horrible to live in with all the street noise. But the reason that it was selling so cheaply is that they were convinced that you would have to walk up 13 stories when the Chinese took over because they wouldn’t fix the elevators. I mean, that’s how things worked.
Nick Giambruno: Doug, you’re one of the foremost authorities in the world on the topic of crisis investing. Tell us a bit about your background on this topic.
Doug Casey: After my second book, Crisis Investing, came out in 1979, I started publishing a newsletter of the same name. I used the Chinese symbol for crisis as the logo. It’s actually a combination of two symbols: the symbol for danger and the symbol for opportunity. The danger is what everybody sees; the opportunity is never quite so obvious as the danger, but it’s always there.
Speculating in crisis markets is the ultimate way to be a contrarian, which means buying when nobody else wants to buy.
It is true, as a general rule, that you want to “make the trend your friend.” But there always comes an inflection point when trends change because a market becomes either greatly overvalued or greatly undervalued. And when any market is down by 90% or more, you’ve got to reflexively look at it, no matter how bad the news is, and see if it’s a place where you want to put some speculative capital.
Nick Giambruno: Massive fortunes have been made throughout history with crisis investing. Was Baron Rothschild right when he said the time to buy is when blood is in the streets?
Doug Casey: That’s a very famous aphorism, of course. It was supposedly occasioned by the Battle of Waterloo, when he was buying British securities while the issue was in doubt.
He was able to pull off that coup because he made sure that he got the information as to whether Wellington beat Napoleon a day before anybody else did. He recognized that Europe was in a period of tremendous crisis; Napoleon, after all, was actually kind of a proto-Hitler.
But a key point here is that a successful speculator capitalizes on politically caused distortions in the market.
If we lived in a completely free-market world—one without government interventions like taxes, regulations, inflation, war, persecutions, and the like—it would be impossible to speculate in the sense I’m using the word.
But we don’t live in a free-market world, so there are lots of good, speculative opportunities that, in effect, let you turn a lemon into lemonade.
And a good speculative opportunity is both high-potential and low-risk—not high-potential and high-risk. Most people don’t understand that.
Nick Giambruno: That brings to mind the Russian oligarchs, who became oligarchs in the first place because they did some crisis investing, i.e., they bought when the blood was in the streets and picked up some of the crown jewels of the Russian economy for literally pennies on the dollar.
Doug Casey: It’s interesting with the oligarchs, because in the Soviet Union, everybody got certificates, which were traded for shares in businesses that were being privatized. The average person had no idea what they were or how to value them. The people who became oligarchs were able to buy them up for a couple of pennies on the dollar, taking advantage of the negative public hysteria following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
So this is a recurring theme—buying when the blood is in the streets. It’s what speculation is all about: namely, taking advantage of politically caused distortions in the marketplace, or taking advantage of the aberrations of mass psychology.
The reaction to Russia’s attack on Ukraine, no matter what you think about it, has exposed the West’s double standards
This sort of global grandstanding, which resembles some sort of mindless virtue-signaling campaign now so popular in liberal capitals, aside from unnecessarily inflaming an already volatile situation, assumes that Russia is totally wrong, period.
Such a reckless approach, which leaves no room for debate, no room for discussion, no room for seeing Russia’s side in this extremely complex situation, only guarantees further standoffs, if not full-blown global war, further down the road.
The West has taken an extreme stance against Russia over its invasion in Ukraine. This reaction exposes a high degree of hypocrisy considering that US-led wars abroad never received the punitive response they deserved.
If the current events in Ukraine have proven anything, it’s that the United States and its transatlantic partners are able to run roughshod across a shell-shocked planet – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, to name a few of the hotspots – with almost total impunity. Meanwhile, Russia and Vladimir Putin are being portrayed in nearly every mainstream media publication today as the second coming of Nazi Germany for their actions in Ukraine.
First, let’s be clear about something. Hypocrisy and double standards alone do not provide justification for the opening of hostilities by any country. In other words, just because NATO-bloc countries have been tearing a path of wanton destruction around the globe since 2001 without serious consequences, this does not give Russia, or any country, moral license to behave in a similar manner. There must be a convincing reason for a country to authorize the use of force, thereby committing itself to what could be considered ‘a just war’. Thus, the question: Can Russia’s actions today be considered ‘just’ or, at the very least, understandable? I will leave that answer up to the reader’s better judgment, but it would be idle not to consider some important details.
Only to the consumers of mainstream media fast food would it come as a surprise that Moscow has been warning on NATO expansion for well over a decade. In his now-famous speech to the Munich Security Conference in 2007, Vladimir Putin poignantly asked the assembled global powerbrokers point blank, “why is it necessary to put military infrastructure on our borders during this [NATO] expansion? Can someone answer this question?” Later in the speech, he said that expanding military assets smack up to the Russian border “is not connected in any way with the democratic choices of individual states.”
Not only were the Russian leader’s concerns met with the predictable amount of disregard amid the deafening sound of crickets, NATO has gone on to bestow membership on four more countries since that day (Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia). As a thought experiment that even a dolt could conduct, imagine Washington’s reaction if Moscow were building a continuously expanding military bloc in South America, for example.
The real cause for Moscow’s alarm, however, came when the US and NATO began flooding neighboring Ukraine with a dazzling array of sophisticated weaponry amid calls for membership in the military bloc. What on earth could go wrong? In Moscow’s mind, Ukraine was beginning to pose an existential threat to Russia.
In December, Moscow, quickly nearing the end of its patience, delivered draft treaties to the US and NATO, demanding they halt any further military expansion eastwards, including by the accession of Ukraine or any other states. It included the explicit statement that NATO “shall not conduct any military activity on the territory of Ukraine or other states of Eastern Europe, South Caucasus and Central Asia.” Once again, Russia’s proposals were met with arrogance and indifference by Western leaders.
While people will have varying opinions as to the shocking actions that Moscow took next, nobody can say they were not warned. After all, it’s not like Russia woke up on February 24 and suddenly decided it was a wonderful day to start a military operation on the territory of Ukraine. So yes, an argument could be made that Russia had concern for its own security as a justification for its actions. Unfortunately, the same thing may be more difficult to say for the United States and its NATO minions with regards to their belligerent behavior over the course of the last two decades.
Consider the most notorious example, the 2003 invasion of Iraq. This disastrous war, which the Western media hacks have chalked up as an unfortunate ‘intelligence failure’, represents one of the most egregious acts of unprovoked aggression in recent memory. Without delving too deep into the murky details, the United States, having just suffered the attacks of 9/11, accused Saddam Hussein of Iraq of harboring weapons of mass destruction. Yet, instead of working in close cooperation with the UN weapons inspectors, who were on the ground in Iraq attempting to verify the claims, the US, together with the UK, Australia, and Poland, launched a ‘shock-and-awe’ bombing campaign against Iraq on March 19, 2003. In a flash, over a million innocent Iraqis suffered death, injury, or displacement by this flagrant violation of international law.
The Center for Public Integrity reported that the Bush administration, in its effort to bolster public support for the impending carnage, made over 900 false statements between 2001 and 2003 about Iraq’s alleged threat to the US and its allies. Yet somehow the Western media, which has become the most rabid proliferator for military aggression bar none, failed to find any flaw in the argument for war – that is, until after the boots and blood were on the ground, of course.
It might be expected, in a more perfect world, that the US and its allies were subjected to some stiff sanctions in the wake of this protracted eight-year ‘mistake’ against innocents. In fact, there were sanctions, just not against the United States. Ironically, the only sanctions that resulted from this crazy military adventure were against France, a NATO member that had declined the invitation, together with Germany, to participate in the Iraqi bloodbath. The global hyper-power is not used to such rejection, especially from its purported friends.
American politicians, self-assured in their Godlike exceptionalism, demanded a boycott of French wine and bottled water due to the French government’s “ungrateful” opposition to war in Iraq. Other agitators for war betrayed their lack of seriousness by insisting that the popular menu item known as ‘French Fries’ be substituted with the name ‘Freedom Fries’ instead. So the lack of French Bordeaux, together with the tedious redrafting of restaurant menus, seems to have been the only real inconveniences the US and NATO suffered for indiscriminately destroying millions of lives.
Now compare this kid gloves approach to the US and its allies to the current situation involving Ukraine, where the scales of justice are clearly weighed down against Russia, and despite its not unreasonable warnings that it was feeling threatened by NATO advances. Whatever a person may think about the conflict now raging between Russia and Ukraine, it cannot be denied that the hypocrisy and double standards being leveled against Russia by its perennial detractors is as shocking as it is predictable. The difference today, however, is that bombs are going off.
Aside from the severe sanctioning of Russian individuals and the Russian economy, perhaps best summed up by the French economy minister, who said his country is committed to waging “a total economic and financial war on Russia,” there has been a deeply disturbing effort to silence news and information coming from those Russian sources that might give the Western public the option of seeing Moscow’s motivations. On Tuesday, March 1, YouTube decided to block the channels of RT and Sputnik for all European users, thereby allowing the Western world to seize another chunk of the global narrative.
Considering the way that Russia has been vilified in the ‘empire of lies’, as Vladimir Putin dubbed the land of his politically motivated persecutors, some may believe that Russia deserves the non-stop threats it is now receiving. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. This sort of global grandstanding, which resembles some sort of mindless virtue-signaling campaign now so popular in liberal capitals, aside from unnecessarily inflaming an already volatile situation, assumes that Russia is totally wrong, period.
Such a reckless approach, which leaves no room for debate, no room for discussion, no room for seeing Russia’s side in this extremely complex situation, only guarantees further standoffs, if not full-blown global war, further down the road. Unless the West is actively seeking the outbreak of World War III, it would be advisable to stop the hideous hypocrisy and double standards against Russia and patiently listen to its opinions and version of events (even ones presented by foreign media). It’s not as unbelievable as some people may wish to believe.
along with the Atlantic, the Economist and Foreign Policy magazines. ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC all praised the idea for its efficiency in coordinating their daily narratives and will all have teams in WePlot offices.
The CIA venture capital fund In-Q-Tel has announced it is funding the entire Series A round for co-working startup WePlot for corporate journalists.
The start up was conceived by a former deputy director of the CIA and an MIT professor of business ergonomics who has been on the CIA payroll for decades.
“We wanted to take the genius of the community ethos of WeWork and apply it to news agencies and the intelligence community to form one group that fuses all the ways both are making the world a better place. And so WePlot was born,” said Professor Won Long Wang who also serves on the boards of Zoom and TikTok.
WePlot got right to work buying up office space in New York and Washington D.C. The New York Times and Washington Post have announced they are moving their entire foreign correspondent staff, foreign policy staff and politics departments to the new co-working spaces, along with the Atlantic, the Economist and Foreign Policy magazines. ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC all praised the idea for its efficiency in coordinating their daily narratives and will all have teams in WePlot offices.
In New York WePlot will be located across the street from the United Nations, while in the capitol they will be next door to the Canon House Office building on the hill where it will be easier to meet with Speaker Pelosi’s team on coordinating stories and narratives on race, white supremacy and domestic terrorism. Washington Post Assistant Editor Malik Ahmed said this would streamline coordination processes with CIA officers.
“Sometimes they get stuck in traffic coming to our offices from Langley and we are late for editorial meetings. This just makes things easier if we all show up at the same place. No more scheduling conflicts or issues with technological or cognitive symmetry.”
CIA spokesperson Shirley Jenkins says it works better for the agency for security reasons as well. “The post doesn’t have the kind of robust cyber security measures we do, so by giving them a place where the infrastructure is already in place we don’t have to constantly be checking their servers for breaches.”
She also mentioned the importance of having their cyber hacking team Anonymous in the new WePlot buildings to better coordinate their attacks with corporate journalists and CIA officers. “Anonymous have been an essential part of going after all the targets that the CIA wants them to go after. Having reporters close by who can manage the narratives of their hacking campaigns will be indispensable in convincing people of the righteousness and virtues of their operations.”
They plan to open a west coast co-working office in Los Angeles that would include all west coast newspapers, plus entertainment rags Rolling Stone, GQ, Variety and Hollywood Reporter. Eventually they will go global with offices in London, Paris, Brussels, Toronto, Tel Aviv, Auckland and Melbourne.
The Tech community praised the idea, calling Professor Wang a real visionary. Kara Swisher called him “…a true genius with the insight and pulse of the news and information economies and how they ought to function in a free and open society that values diversity of thought and transparency.”
WePlot has plans to expand in silicon valley with representatives from Google, Apple, Facebook (now Meta) and Twitter meeting with news agencies together in real time to coordinate which authoritative sources will be allowed on their platforms instead of getting daily memos from the CIA.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg released a statement early today celebrating the start-up, “We need more Wangs out there to probe for the truth. It’s just a big win for democracy and in the war against misinformation.”
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My spidey senses tell me that Col Douglas Macgregor will not be welcomed back on Fox News after he gave a rather different take on what is happening amid the Russia-Ukraine conflict that does not toe the common media line. [SEGMENT HERE] Jennifer Griffin was furious.
The first presentation was during a segment with Fox Host Dan Bongino (below). The second presentation of essentially the same analysis was with Trey Gowdy [SEGMENT HERE]. In both discussions Macgregor’s perspective reconciles the disparity between what the U.S. government, State Dept, and corporate media are saying -vs- what is visible.
Essentially, Macgregor is saying that Russia does not want to engage a civilian population and is making every effort to avoid civilian conflict in those population centers. In part this is because Putin knows the Western approach is a propaganda war that would be fueled by what it would look like if population carnage took place. However, if Ukraine President Zelenskyy does not acquiesce to terms, Putin could easily crush those centers with artillery and rockets. WATCH:
What Macgregor outlines would explain why these skirmishes always seem ‘off in the distance’.
The western government and media perspective is to make it seem like Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the rebellious civilian misfits are beating the Russian army because that frames a better story. However, what Macgregor outlines is Putin not wanting to fuel the United Nations, NATO and State Dept narrative engineering, thus the absence of visible fighting.
The second segment with Trey Gowdy is HERE… and below:
Fox News Pentagon war seller Jennifer Griffin, aka the female version of Mark Milley, was having fits.
wow — Jennifer Griffin continues her live fact-check of Fox colleagues and guests:
“I feel like I need to correct some of the things that Col. Douglas MacGregor said, and I’m not sure that 10 minutes is enough time to do so, because there were so many distortions.” pic.twitter.com/nsdvoGwwXi
The nature of government is control; the control of people, industry, abstracts, and even nature itself. It is the many complexities of control and the many layers of government that leads to crisis, smothers individual action and deters those of wisdom to shine through.
The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is remembered for its frightful brinkmanship, when the United States and Soviet Union danced close to the furnace of global destruction. Fortunately cooler heads prevailed and a war of the worst kind was averted. One such cool head was Soviet naval officer Vasili Aleksandrovich Arkhipov, who was aboard a submarine at the height of the crisis. The nuclear torpedo armed submarine he was a crew member of came under depth charge attack from the U.S. Navy. Soviet doctrine at the time determined that if such a submarine came under attack, three officers needed to agree to launch a nuclear weapon, when no other orders had been received. Isolated and under stress, Arkhipov disagreed with his comrades and averted any escalation.
While operating under radio silence and at the peak of the Cold War, with a Captain deadset on launching the nuclear torpedo on the Americans, Arkhipov remained resilient and reasoned for caution, aware of what such a response could lead to. He insisted on no launch. He was adamant that more information was needed before such an attack should be unleashed. The submarine eventually received radio signals and with the new information and orders from the Soviet government, the submarine was removed from a situation where attacking U.S. ships with nuclear weapons was not to be considered for the time being.
Upon returning back to the Soviet Union, Arkhipov and his crewmen were criticized by his superiors. They had failed; their submarine had been tracked and then come under attack by the Americans. This was an embarrassment to the pride of the navy and Soviet Union. Instead of seeing a cool headed officer as a hero, he was clumped in with the rest of the crew and criticized for incompetence by men who were participants in such hubris and folly that could have contributed to the world losing millions of lives in a matter of minutes. Well aware of the catastrophe that Arkhipov had prevented, the Soviet government officials were more concerned with doctrine and procedure.
It would take decades before Arkhipov was recognized for his cool reason under great peer pressure and stress. The cold war mood soon shifted and the paranoia of the Russian state would change somewhat, allowing for the acknowledgement of such individuals who defied the collective will or sacred doctrine to have their stories told. It is hard to imagine how many lives that the inaction of Arkhipov saved, how the course of history would have been reshaped if he had obeyed and performed according to how policy makers wanted him to. The irrationality of the Cuba Missile Crisis was created by the biggest governments on the Earth. Human beings of apparent wisdom and immense education all conspired in their own way to bring the planet close to destruction, and for what end? Other than the pursuit of their own ideologies, the perpetuation of their government, pride or just because it was their job? Should they have accomplished mass destruction, none of that would have mattered at all.
Just over twenty years later it would be for another member of the Soviet military who would use clear judgement to prevent nuclear war. In another phase for high tension between the Cold War adversaries. In 1983 Duty Officer Stanislav Petrov was assigned as part of the Soviet early warning system dedicated to detect incoming missile strikes from the United States. In the early hours of the morning sudden computer read outs indicated that several missiles had been launched in the direction of the Soviet Union. The protocol was to attack immediately in response.
However Duty Officer Petrov did not report the computer read outs to his superiors. He instead dismissed them as a false alarm. He was in breach of duty. He disobeyed procedure and the doctrinal rules. A retaliatory strike would have been almost certain, given the limited response time and the nature of destruction that a U.S. first strike would have caused. Petrov had no advice and only the information coming from his archaic Soviet computer.
What had made Petrov suspicious was how strong and clear the alert was. Though apprehensive, he was certain that it was a glitch. Petrov called his superior at the Soviet Army headquarters and reported an error in the system. If Petrov was wrong in a matter of minutes nuclear blasts would be erupting over the Soviet Union, but by then others would have been well aware of such an attack. If he was right, for the rest of the world it was an otherwise normal morning.
It would be after the fall of the Soviet Union when Petrov would receive recognition for his inaction. He had speculated that if some of his colleagues had been on the shift when it occurred, they may have acted according to the procedures, since most of them were well trained and good military men. Such procedures when written are laid down as absolute, but when wise reasoning human beings exercise judgement and remain patient, lives are saved. (Despite doing what they were trained not to do).
“But they were lucky it was me on shift that night,” Petrov said years later. The world certainly was lucky.
Giant collectivist states like those of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union celebrate men of action, decision-makers and administrators that cause carnage and misery. They do not celebrate those who are careful and exercise a wisdom in the spirit of laissez-faire, perhaps because government is always about its own growth and the need to control, regulate, and force. It attracts in its most extreme cases people people like Nazi Reinhard Heydrich and it deters those like Arkhipov or Petrov or at the very least punishes them for not acting according to the rule book. When it was their lack of action that saved lives and even the state itself, such people are marginalized.
Crisis seems to attract the need to act, even when it is the same course of action over and over again that can increase the crisis. Patience and non-interference is seldom valued; it is the antithesis of government and those attracted to the institutions of power. To the state a man like Heydrich is always a hero, so long as he is in their employ, and such a man would never tolerate Arkhipov or Petrov. And for that we all end up suffering.
The nature of government is control; the control of people, industry, abstracts, and even nature itself. It is the many complexities of control and the many layers of government that leads to crisis, smothers individual action and deters those of wisdom to shine through. Instead it promotes the bully culture of the mob and the arrogance of a perceived “greater good” is often sought. How this good is determined tends to be directed from the perspective of the elites and ruling class. By the nature of their position they have determined that they know what is best for all others. To make decisions and to act upon them is their superhuman ability based upon the positions that they fill inside of government. Lives are in their hands and they command them with absolute arrogance, and unlike any deity they are ignorant of more than they will ever be aware.
When you have those like Arkhipov and Petrov and the many modern whistleblowers, they exist to challenge the perfection of the system or the institution itself. Apostates who should know better, even if they end up saving lives. To the government they did not do the right thing, but according to humanity they did.
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Beloved health expert Dr. Fauci has made his way into the spotlight again—this time with new recommendations for keeping safe during a nuclear strike should Putin do the unthinkable.
“Should we face a catastrophic nuclear war scenario, it’s important to stay protected from all the nuclear fallout,” said Fauci in his trademark Fauci voice. “To keep all the nuclear fallout out of your nose and mouth, you should probably wear at least three masks. Maybe even four masks. The science isn’t clear right now. But I would say at least three masks. Maybe four or five though, just to be safe. Actually, maybe six. And another one over your eyes too.”
Fauci went on to explain that proper social distancing will also be essential, as it will prevent your nuclear fallout from jumping to another person. “Ideally, everyone should probably have their own personal fallout shelter just to maintain proper distancing,” he said.
Fauci assured everyone that if they follow the science by listening to his every command, “they will be ok. Probably. But also maybe probably not.”
In unrelated news, the NIH has approved $12 million in funding for experiments on irradiated mutant creatures.
When even New York City abandons its vaccine passport system (it’s gone as of March 7), it’s over.
At least in the non-California United States, anyway.
There is plenty still to talk about on the COVID front, of course, and we have to make sure not only that existing restrictions are lifted but also that they can never return again.
At the same time:
It’s growing clearer that it’s time for me to return to a more diverse array of topics, along the lines of what I covered in these emails before March 2020.
I have an extremely diverse subscriber base. Some people agree with everything I say. Some are here for COVID only. Some came for COVID but stayed for the whole libertarian package.
Regardless of whether any of those describe you, I think we can all say we learned (or had reinforced) certain key things from all this, among them:
(1) There is something seriously wrong with the American establishment.
(2) The American establishment does not have your best interests at heart.
(3) There is something seriously wrong with the American medical establishment.
(4) A large percentage of the general public is prepared to go along with whatever the establishment demands of them, without the slightest hint of curiosity about whether it makes sense or not.
(5) Dissident voices may not always be right, but they’re right a lot, and they are demonized by fashionable opinion.
(6) Central direction by an elite of alleged experts who cannot be questioned is a bad way to organize society.
(7) We should never believe these people again, if we ever did. Everything they say must be scrutinized. They do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
(8) We may disagree among ourselves, but I respect every single one of you who stuck with me along this journey, and regardless of what differences we may have from here on out I will listen to you with respect because you were right on the issue of our age — indeed of many ages.
Now, having said all that, I present to you the most recent episode of the Tom Woods Show, called “Russia, Ukraine, and NATO.”
I know that this audience is mature enough to listen to it without responding in the kind of bumper-sticker slogans I would see on cable news or in the New York Times.
It’s the most important episode of the year, for sure, and perhaps of many years.
It’s two grownups talking. Nothing juvenile here, no calling people “Putin lovers” or whatever else the pathetic children who form American opinion spend their time uttering.
The dismantling of the Canadian trucker convoy protest by Trudeau and his henchmen has exposed the agenda of the Western elite. What we are witnessing in Canada is emblematic of the sociopolitical and economic condition of the US and the West more generally. The abrogation of natural and legal rights, the “legal” prohibition of dissent, the cancellation of small, independent producers (to the benefit of monopolies), the increasing penetration of state and corporate surveillance, the implicitly approved hacking of the names and addresses of dissenters and their supporters, the exposure of dissidents by the press and social media, the confiscation of the property of those who hold “unacceptable views”—these are not only facts in Canada; they are the near future, if not the present, in the US and beyond. Together, these represent the Chinese state model writ large and rolled out across the world, a model engineered, unwittingly or not, by Western elites in the first place.
Now that the mask is off, the naked and effete face of tyranny has been exposed. It is a tyranny of leftist authoritarian patsies—a tyranny of the state, of course, but also of leftist foot soldiers among the so-called intelligentsia and activist base. The latter groups are comprised of those whose values “the clique in power” supposedly represents—the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” crowd with their crowd-sourced opinions. They have been trained by their overlords to view divergence from the orthodoxy of race-baiting and identity politicking über alles as manifest evil. Ironically, along with the powers that be, they deem dissent the equivalent of fascism while statespersons and their servants display their fascistic attitudes and actions at every opportunity. Their disdain for the unwashed is matched only by (and is predicated upon) their own insecurity, given that the basis of their upward socio-occupational adjustment is a special identity status or an unwavering fealty to the agenda. Holding the correct opinions has been lent a moral status denied truckers and the rest of the hoi polloi.
The ironies continue to multiply. Justin Trudeau and his fellow statespersons have likened the protesters to the followers of totalitarian regimes of the past, even while enacting totalitarian measures in the present. “Honk honk” is, don’t you know, “an acronym for ‘Heil Hitler,’” not a trucker’s signal to clear the way for precious cargo and for those who carry it or a symbol of protest against enforced immobility. Such “reversive blockades” and inversions of reality are the sure symptoms of totalitarianism.1
Even socialists parrot the establishment view of the truckers and their protest, a real working-class movement if there ever was one, but not the right kind, as far as they are concerned, because not based on the right creed. “Freedom” is not only not a worthy object—it is the cry of the “far-right,” white supremacist neo-Nazi. “Freedom from necessity” is what the socialists and their comrades extol, as if all economic activity were not predicated on fundamental lack. And necessity is exactly what the truckers represent, a necessity that those the truckers and other workers cater to must deny without reservation.
Freedom has been deemed a nonessential commodity. The US Bill of Rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms have been effectively cancelled, revealed as nonbinding palimpsests to be overwritten by the “Emergencies Act” and other state-of-emergency decrees. These “sacred” documents indeed have the status of religious scriptures in a secular state—held by some to be true but inapplicable outside of privately held belief. The principle that the rights these documents acknowledge do not proceed from governments but preexist them has been dismissed with derision. The ruling elite have granted to themselves the prerogative to nullify them on command.
Conspicuously missing from the recent rhetoric and dictates of unfreedom is any mention of concern about the spread of covid. In case any doubt remained, one knows unequivocally now that one was never locked down for one’s “own good,” but rather from a predetermined desideratum to restrain, forbid, and extract obedience from the willing or unwilling subject. Those who saw covid-19 as a pretext for the administration of coercion have been vindicated, whether the lackeys say otherwise or not. Yes, covid-19 can be a serious disease, but the mitigation of disease was never the ultimate object of the covid regime. And those who believed that the rationale for the supposed mitigation measures was earnest must now admit that “the state of exception” will be permanent, as the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben suggested almost twenty years ago.
Many nevertheless continue to exercise a modicum of self-determination, so long as they are granted the necessary leeway. But with the incessant pull of the establishment overlords and their bureaucratic executors, the noose continually tightens around most necks (despite the apparent remission of covid’s latest variant)—if only psychologically for now. In any case, at every step, one is admonished to consider what is allowed and what is forbidden, whether in terms of economic and political expression, mobility, or even one’s innermost thoughts.2 The existential crisis of freedom is acute, as the state and corporate responses to the truckers’ protest have made eminently clear.
1. Andrew M. Łobaczewski, Political Ponerology: The Science of Evil, Psychopathy, and the Origins of Totalitarianism, ed. Harrison Koehli, rev. ed. (Otto, NC: Red Pill Press, forthcoming), pp. 148–49. “Emphatically insisting upon something which is the opposite of the truth blocks the average person’s mind from perceiving the truth.”
2. See the third change to the Canadian criminal code proposed in Bill C-36, An Act to Amend the Criminal Code and the Canadian Human Rights Act and to Make Related Amendments to Another Act (Hate Propaganda, Hate Crimes and Hate Speech), 2d sess., 43d Parliament, 2021, https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/43-2/bill/C-36/first-reading. “The Act is amended by adding the following after section 810.011: Fear of hate propaganda offence or hate crime,” which suggests that a person may provide information to a judge if he or she entertains a “[f]ear of hate propaganda offence or hate crime” yet to be committed by someone else.
The Russian background discussion is very interesting. The AEI analyst, historian seems to have forgotten the 2014 US state department sponsored overthrow of the pro Russian Ukrainian government. Recall the famous Victoria Nuland “F*** the EU” phone call where she discusses who will lead the new government. No mention of Neo-nazi riddled replacement government. There is little in the anti-Putin tirade that doesn’t apply to US foreign policy since WWII. Notably the Middle East and South East Asia.
The US doesn’t lie!!!
Any association with the AEI should peak your warparty/warmonger situational awareness.
AEI/Raytheon/McDonnell Douglas want to get those US made weapons to Ukraine ASAP! But the question is why is it the US’ responsibility? Surprise, the defense budget is way too low.
Did I mention follow the money?
This episode was recorded on February 27, 2022. Dr. Frederick W. Kagan is a former professor of history with a PhD in Russian and Soviet military history from Yale. He is also a celebrated author and the director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project. In this episode, I discuss the nature of the conflict that has taken the world by storm over the last 5 days—Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine and the ongoing resistance of its citizens. Dr. Kagan is a wealth of information on military history, geopolitics, Putin’s relationship with the USSR (which his father helped defend) and Ukrainian sovereignty, and other aspects of what’s most certainly a moment in human history that won’t be forgotten soon.
US President Joe Biden seems to think things are “hunky dory” for the American people, according to Sky News host Rita Panahi.
“The US is experiencing a 40-year high inflation rate. People are struggling to afford groceries or to fill their car with gas,” Ms Panahi said.
“Crime is soaring across the US and the country has completely lost control of its southern border with more than 200,000 illegal immigrants crossing a month.
“But sure, the American people have never had it better, they’re just ungrateful or suffering from a unique variety of long COVID.
“The man is either unhinged, hopelessly confused or just lying. At this point there are no other options.”
Speculating in crisis markets is the ultimate way to be a contrarian, which means buying when nobody else wants to buy.
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