“AstraZeneca uncovers what’s triggering blood clots after its jab,” reads a recent headline from Mail Online.
“Oh, oh, oh!” one feels like exclaiming. So it is true after all. After nearly one year of stonewalling and denials, they officially admit that the COVID vaccines can, in fact, cause blood clots.
This will undoubtedly come as a great shock to those who believe the mainstream media narratives, where all talk of vaccine injury has been hitherto dismissed as “misinformation” from those right-wing anti-vaxxers.
We have been repeatedly told that only crazy people would believe that the COVID vaccines could be dangerous. After all, scientists and public health officials have always reassured us that these vaccines are “completely safe and effective.”
It turns out, however, that the mantra “completely safe and effective” is not true, since those crack scientists who devised these vaccines now admit that their product can also generate blood clots.
But we should not worry too much about it, because they also helpfully inform us that they may have discovered what in their vaccines causes these deadly side-effects (emphasis added):
They found that the shell of the vector vaccine — the weakened cold virus used to teach cells how to neutralise COVID — sometimes acts like a magnet and attracts platelets, a protein found in the blood. For reasons the scientists are still probing, the body then mistakes these platelets as a threat and produces antibodies to fight them. The combination of the platelets and the antibodies clumping together leads to the formation of dangerous blood clots.
Congratulations on that discovery, but it comes a little late in the game after hundreds of millions of doses of AstraZeneca have been injected into people’s bodies worldwide.
American foreign policy, wrapped up in hubris inside American exceptionalism, is incapable of recognizing a dangerous situation.
And a dangerous situation is what we have.
The Russian deputy foreign minister Sergey Ryabkov speaking for the Kremlin has made it clear that Russia will tolerate no further movement of NATO toward Russia’s borders.
Russia has ruled out any possibility of the former Russian provinces of Ukraine and Georgia becoming NATO members. If this red line is ignored, the consequences, Ryabkov said, “will be dire.” Russia will respond militarily, and the West, he said, will find it has undermined its own security, not Russia’s.
In other words, as the Kremlin sees it, the incorporation of Ukraine and/or Georgia into NATO is an unacceptable threat to Russian national security. Period. It is not negotiable.
In a rational world such an unequivocal statement by a preeminent military power with hypersonic nuclear missiles would be taken seriously.
But the Western World is no longer rational. It is a world drunk on arrogance. The NATO secretary replied to what is, in effect, an ultimatum from a nuclear power by rejecting out of hand that power’s security concern:
“Whether kii joins NATO is up to the bloc’s member states and its leadership, and Moscow doesn’t have input into the decision.” The idiot NATO secretary went on to boast, foolishly, that NATO was so little impressed with Russian objections that NATO was “already training Ukrainian troops and consulting with them, and are conducting joint exercises and providing military supplies and technology.”
The White House spokesperson replying for President Biden and the National Security Council said Washington “will not compromise” on NATO expansion, adding that Washington won’t accept the idea of halting NATO expansion, despite what Russia demands.
In other words–be certain to understand this and its consequences–Washington’s position is that Russia has NO legitimate national security interests except as defined by Washington.
Here we have a highly dangerous situation. One power says you are treading on me and we won’t tolerate it; the other power says you have no say in the matter.
During the 20th century Cold War we Cold Warriors heard every word, every intonation of what the Soviets said. To risk nuclear war because some fool had wax in his ears or was feeling macho that day was out of the question. In those days there were departments of Russian studies in US universities that were not dependent on funding from the military-security complex. There was public debate. There was always an independent expert, such as Stephen Cohen, to remind everyone of how the Russians saw the situation.Russia Has Western Enemies, Not Partners
Today independent scholarship has disappeared. Russian studies programs in universities are Russophobic in keeping with their funding. As there are no objective scholars, there are no knowledgeable people in the US intelligence community. We can see this in the recent statement of Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan, who reports that US intelligence agencies believe that Putin is “giving serious consideration” to an invasion of Ukraine.
Washington has been saying this since 2014 when Washington overthrew the Russian friendly Ukrainian government hoping to seize in the process the Russian naval base in Crimea. It is a fixed message. There is no thought. Just repetition of propaganda. So we have a National Security Council incapable of nothing but the repetition of propagandistic slogans.
In effect Washington is already at war with Russia.
Meanwhile last Thursday evening, December 16, Washington and its neo-nazi Ukraine puppet decided to confirm Russian suspicions that Washington and Ukraine represent revanchist Nazism. Only two countries voted against the UN resolution condemning Nazism. Yes, it was the United States and Ukraine. The utter total stupidity of the US vote is extraordinary. That Washington supports Nazism is the last thing the Kremlin needed to hear.
My generation was the last generation in the West to be educated instead of indoctrinated, and even we were fed lies about World War I and World War II.
Subsequent generations are largely unaware that in German-occupied Western Ukraine large armies were organized and incorporated into the German army’s march into Russia. It was remnants of these “Banderas” (Stepan Bandera) that Washington used to overthrow the Ukrainian government and install an American puppet state on former Russian territory while the Kremlin, ignoring its backyard, was enjoying the Sochi Olympics.
The mistakes that people make have more to do with world history than any good decisions.
I am watching Washington, which I know so well from a quarter century of high level participation, make the mistake of a lifetime. The Washington regime is so full of arrogance that it is unable to comprehend that Russia has run out of patience.
The Russians see a real problem. All Washington sees is a propaganda opportunity. This is a situation that leads directly to Washington miscalculating. The miscalculation will be fatal.
Update to America’s Foreign Policy Dilemma
In America Russophobia is running amuck.
The Propaganda Ministry repeats daily that Russia is on the verge of invading Ukraine.
The American people, long trained to regard Russia as the enemy, have heard the allegation so many times it has become a fact.
The arrogant Biden regime has rebuffed Russia’s security concern, and the Republicans are no better. Blind belligerence towards Russia is building as Republican senators add their voices to the propaganda that Putin intends to invade Ukraine and “rob the Ukrainian people of their sovereignty.”( Washington already did that when it overthrew the elected Ukrainian government in 2014 and established a puppet state in Kiev.)
The Republicans want to rush $450 million more in weapons to “the brave Ukrainian armed forces.” And for good measure, the Republicans want to have Russia designated a terrorist state.
The Ukraine crisis is in part an armaments marketing program as the Republicans backing the bill are in tight with the military/security complex. But everyone is overlooking the effect on the Kremlin whose trust in Washington has reached zero on the scale.
Perhaps in preparation for what the Kremlin sees will be a showdown over Washington’s indifference to Russia’s security concern, the Kremlin has ordered two strategic nuclear missile forces to combat duty. Additionally, Russia has closed the northern sea route and deployed radio engineering regiments and electronic domes to jam US over-the-horizon radar. If US naval provocations continue in the Black Sea, Russia might also close the Black Sea.
Meanwhile, the neo-nazi Ukrainian battalions armed by Washington are escalating the situation with the Donbass Russians.
Washington is setting itself up for an embarrassing backdown or a major confrontation for which Washington holds few cards.
The problem was the restocking was too late, as most available LNG from the USA, Qatar and other sources that normally would be available had already been sold to China where an equally confused energy policy, including a political ban on Australian coal, has led to plant closings and a recent government order to secure gas and coal “at any cost.” Qatar, US LNG exporters and others have flocked to Asia leaving the EU in the cold, literally.
irst published by Global Research on October 22, 2021
***
The price of energy from all sources conventional is exploding globally. Far from accidental, it is a well-orchestrated plan to collapse the industrial world economy that has already been weakened dramatically by almost two years of ridiculous covid quarantine and related measures.
What we are seeing is a price explosion in key oil, coal and now especially, natural gas energy. What makes this different from the energy shocks of the 1970s is that this time, it is developing as the corporate investment world, using the fraudulent ESG green investment model, is dis-investing in future oil, gas and coal while OECD governments embrace horrendously inefficient, unreliable solar and wind that will insure the collapse of industrial society perhaps as early as the next months. Barring a dramatic rethinking, the EU and other industrial economies are willfully committing economic suicide.
What only a few years ago was accepted as obvious was that ensuring an abundant, reliable, efficient and affordable energy defines the economy. Without efficient energy we cannot make steel, concrete, mine raw materials or any of the things that support our modern economies. In the past months the world price of coal for power generation has doubled. The price of natural gas has risen by almost 500%. Oil is headed to $90 a barrel, highest in seven years. This is a planned consequence of what is sometimes called the Davos Great Reset or the Green Agenda zero carbon madness.
Some two decades ago Europe began a major shift to mis-named renewables or Green Energy, mainly solar and wind. Germany, the heart of EU industry, led the transformation with former chancellor Merkel’s ill-conceived Energiewende, where Germany’s last nuclear power plants will close in 2022 and coal plants are rapidly being phased out. This all has now collided with the reality that Green Energy is not at all able to deal with major supply shortages. The crisis was entirely predictable.
Green Chickens Come Home to Roost
With the widespread covid lockdowns of industry and travel in 2020 EU natural gas consumption fell dramatically. The largest EU gas supplier, Gazprom of Russia, in interest of an orderly long-term market, duly reduced its deliveries to the EU market even at a loss. An unusually mild 2019-2020 winter allowed EU gas storage to reach maximum. A long, severe winter all but erased that in 2021.
It is the ultimate tragedy that criminals are in charge of the earth. In the name of public health, they have taken over, and even those confronting them, like Senator Ron Paul, are being way too nice as people, and now babies increasingly die. But, unfortunately, it is not just ordinary criminals but criminally insane psychopaths who have claimed the right to dominate 8 billion people.
It has been a while since I have made a personal communication. For starters, I wish everyone the best holiday possible. Though it is a time for joy it is hard to make any serious communication without mentioning what is going on in the world. For instance, governments worldwide are introducing new restrictions to curb the spread of the Omicron variant. We might as well try to curb the spread of the common cold or ordinary flu or even curb people’s thoughts.
They say that Omicron is rapidly spreading, but to know that, they would have to have installed extremely expensive testing equipment all around the world, which they have not done. So again, we have a propaganda virus being spread by the elite-owned media, which hates the human race with lies.
This virus, which is probably a fantasy, is reported to be mild, maybe even milder than the common cold. Though no one seems to have died from it, stock markets are dropping because of this fiction. For those who love to panic, and for politicians and demented virologists who eat up any excuse to take more power, just go ahead and panic but the rest of us should enjoy our holidays.
Insightful Tom Luongo said, “There is still the threat in its name to our liberty and sanity from those who profit most from the fear of the virus. The aftershocks from COVID will be with us for the foreseeable future. An entire generation has been scarred by this manufactured apocalypse, and there will be no going back to the way things were.”
Update (1515ET): Manchin on Monday laid out possible changes to the $2 trillion Build Back Better economic agenda which might encourage him to reverse his “no” on the legislation.For starters, Manchin said he would only support a $1.75 trillion bill that seriously overhauls the US tax code, and that significantly lowers the cost of a broader array of prescription drugs vs. the current offering.”If you’re going to negotiate then negotiate. Don’t start picking and choosing and playing games,” he said.
He also wants work requirements for benefits, such as expanded child tax credits, as well as a means test which would cut off people making over $200,000 per y ear.
Manchin’s vision for the child tax credit is at odds with Biden’s pledge to not raise taxes on those earning less than $400,000. Manchin suggested scaling back the tax benefit for those earning between $200,000 and $400,000. He said he didn’t believe that parents who didn’t earn any income should be able to get the credit, a revision that would reverse a change Democrats made to the benefit earlier this year.Even if those changes are made, Manchin indicated he has other issues with the bill and how its been pushed through Congress. –Bloomberg
The West Virginia moderate also said he wants the bill to be run through several Senate committees that would examine its effects, and he’s also rejected attempts to fast-track “major policy changes” that would bypass the GOP filibuster.* * *Update (1034ET): Sen. Joe Manchin said during a local radio interview that Joe Biden’s staff did some ‘inexcusable’ things which drove him to reject the Build Back Better plan.
On statewide WV radio, explaining his decision to buck BBB, Manchin says Biden staffers alienated him. “They drove some things, and they put some things out that were absolutely inexcusable. They know what it is, and that’s it,” he says on @HoppyKercheval‘s MetroNews program.
Manchin takes a shot at WH staff. “This is not the president — this is staff.. They drove some things that are absolutely in excusable.” “I just got to the wit’s end of what happened.” He won’t say if he’ll accept scaled-back bill. Says it needs to go through committees first
“They figured surely to God we can move one person. We surely can badger and beat one person up. Surely we can get enough protesters to make that person uncomfortable enough that they’ll just say, ‘OK I’ll vote for anything,'” Manchin continued. “Well, guess what? I’m from West Virginia. I’m not from where they’re from and they can just beat the living crap out of people and think they’ll be submissive, period.”* * *Progressive Democrats are livid at moderate Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) for killing the Biden administration’s $2 trillion Build Back Better plan over the weekend.“Our entire democracy is on the line,” tweeted congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday. “We, as always, are here to fight for this agenda. What matters most to us is that it gets done,” she added. “But we cannot just shrug our shoulders and accept this as some Charlie Brown moment.””So we need to get back in there and get this s*** done. Period.”
My wish to LRC readers is to think of Chartres as a symbol of hope, a gift to humanity that is especially welcome during this holiday season. Think of the beauty that is possible by inspired human hands.Think of its unlikely survival through the centuries during the dark days we are experiencing now.
Chartres is a small town (about 38k population) 50 miles southwest of Paris. In 1220 the Cathedral de Notre Dame was completed there, a gift of the pious citizens and other donors. For the intervening 800 years this edifice and the town where it resides has been giving spiritual and hospitable welcome to visitors from throughout the world. I recently took the train to visit Chartres on a very gray, chilly day.
It is the embodiment of the faith, intellect and engineering of the Medieval mind as explained in this short documentary from the Encyclopedia Britannica (that I highly recommend) made in the 1960s. What I can say is that I now look at the world differently since I have encountered the Symbolic World of Jonathan Pageau. It is not that I understand the pervasive symbolism of everything about the cathedral, but I realize there is meaning in the overall structure as well as each detail (watch the video linked to above). Consider one detail, in the incredibly ornate choir screen consisting of hundreds of stone sculptures there is a bishop holding his severed head. Perhaps this is the 3rd century martyr Saint Denis the Bishop of Paris. He is said to have continued to preach after he was executed. But also within the screen are headless figures that were spoiled during the French revolution. Or in an exterior sculptureChrist is supported by griffins, the protectors of treasure. I also observed that he famous labyrinth embedded in the floor was largely obscured with chairs and the ongoing restoration was evident in two adjacent sections of the ceiling.
The cathedral has a remarkable history of survival. The first church on the site dates to the 4th century. Four more had been erected and destroyed up to the late 12th century. “On the night of 10 July 1194, another major fire devastated the cathedral. Only the crypt, the towers, and the new facade survived. The cathedral was already known throughout Europe as a pilgrimage destination, due to the reputed relics of the Virgin Mary that it contained.…Reconstruction began almost immediately. Some portions of the building had survived, including the two towers and the royal portal on the west end, and these were incorporated into the new cathedral.” During the revolution the local Revolutionary Committee decided to destroy the cathedral with explosives. As the story goes, a local architect, consulted on how to best bring the edifice down, saved it by convincing the committee that the rubble would take years to clear away. This story sounds a bit fishy to me, but the fact that the cathedral survived with only a few lost heads to statues is just one of its miraculous escapes. Like Notre Dame in Paris in 2017, “in 1836, due to the negligence of workmen, a fire began which destroyed the lead-covered wooden roof and the two belfries, but the building structure and the stained glass were untouched. The old roof was replaced by a copper-covered roof on an iron frame.” Perhaps the most interesting escape for the cathedral occurred during WWII. In the breakout from the Normandy beachhead in August 1944 the American 3rd Army under General Patton headed south and encountered German resistance at Chartres. The cathedral is the highest landmark for miles around the surrounding farmland. So on the morning of the 16th the general staff decided to destroy the cathedral because, they believed, it would make an ideal location to site the German artillery and for snipers. One staff officer, Colonel Welborn Barton Griffith Jr, recognized the abomination of this plan. He volunteered to confirm the danger posed by the cathedral towers. Taking a single volunteer driver with him, he skirted the German patrols and found the cathedral empty. He mounted the tower and hung an American flag and rang the bells to signal that the cathedral was safe. He died in combat later that day in the town of Lèves near Chartres.
Chartres, like many small French towns, is a delight in itself. The well preserved 1930s train station is the first hint to the visitor that the town has more to offer than only Medieval treasures. For example, in the business district there is a wonderful Renaissance era house. The covered market built in 1898 is in the style of Baltard in his use of steel. A more grand building is the public library (actually called with more accuracy a mediatheque). It was built as a post office in the 1920s in a neo renaissance style with art deco features. The only note off key for me was that the short walk on the main street leaving the station toward the cathedral is dominated by kebab stands.
My wish to LRC readers is to think of Chartres as a symbol of hope, a gift to humanity that is especially welcome during this holiday season. Think of the beauty that is possible by inspired human hands.Think of its unlikely survival through the centuries during the dark days we are experiencing now.
My photos follow below.
The imposing west entrance and the far from twin towers. The Christmas tree is a fitting symbol of symbiotic unity of the town and cathedral. The famous flying buttresses of Chartres.
Christ and the griffins, “the griffin was thought to be an especially powerful and majestic creature. Since classical antiquity, griffins were known for guarding treasures and priceless possessions.”
The magnificent windows of the west portal. The restored choir looking toward the east end.
The Renaissance version of the comic version of the life of Jesus and Mary. What looks like a bishop, perhaps Saint Denis of Paris, who has not lost his severed head.
These heads were lost during the revolution. Evidence of the physical restoration in adjacent sections of the barrel vaulted ceiling.
The Renaissance era house and the covered market built in 1898.
The pretentious public library (actually called with more accuracy a mediatheque) and the train station.
For Thierry Meyssan, by taking to the streets, the French have become the first Western population to take personal risks to oppose financial globalisation. Although they do not realise it, and still imagine that their problems are exclusively national, their enemy is the same force that crushed the region of the African Great Lakes and a part of the Greater Middle East. In order to understand the project which inextricably unites these apparently disparate events, we have to take a step back.
International relations experienced a profound change with the paralysis of the Soviet Union in 1986, when the State was unable to control the civilian nuclear incident in Tchernobyl [1], then with the revocation of the Warsaw Pact in 1989, when the East German Communist Party [2] destroyed the Berlin Wall, and finally, with the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.
At that time, the President of the United States, George Bush Sr., decided to demobilise one million soldiers and devote the efforts of his country to its own prosperity. He wanted to transform US hegemony within its zone of influence, and expand it into that of the leader of the world, the guarantor of world stability. With that, he laid the foundations for a « New World Order », first of all in the speech he gave side by side with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, at the Aspen Institute (2 August 1990), then during his speech to Congress (11 September 1990), announcing operation « Desert Storm » [3].
The world of the après-Soviet Union is one of free circulation, not only of merchandise, but also world capital, under the unique control of the United States. In other words, the passage from capitalism to financialisation – not the triumphant culmination of free exchange, but an exacerbated form of colonial exploitation of the whole world, including the West. Within the space of a quarter of a century, the major US fortunes have multiplied many times, and the global wealth of the world has increased considerably.
By allowing capitalism to run wild, President Bush Sr. hoped to extend prosperity to the world. But capitalism is not a political project, it is simply a system of logic designed for creating profit. The logic of the US multinationals was to increase their profits by delocalising production to China, where it is now possible, and where workers are the lowest paid in the world.
Those who were prepared to measure the cost of this advance for the West were few and far between. New middle classes began to appear in the third world, and although they were, of course, far less wealthy than those in the West, they enabled new, mainly Asian states, to play a rôle on the world stage. But simultaneously, Western middle classes began to disappear [4], meaning that it became impossible for the democratic institutions they built to survive. Above all, the populations of entire regions were to be entirely crushed, starting with those of the African Great Lakes. This first regional war caused 6 million deaths, in Angola, Burundi, Namibia, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Zimbabwe, and was met with general incomprehension and indifference. The aim was to continue to seize the natural resources of these countries, but to pay less and less for them, which meant dealing with gangs rather than with the States who had to feed their populations.
The sociological transformation of the world is happening very fast and is clearly without precedent, although we do not have the statistical tools available today to evaluate it with precision. However, everyone can witness the increase in power of Eurasia, (not in the Gaullist sense of « Brest to Vladivostok », but that of Russia and Asia without Western and Central Europe), which seeks liberty and prosperity, while the Western powers, including the United States, are slowly and progressively declining, limiting individual freedom and ejecting half of their population into zones of poverty.
Today, the percentage of imprisonment in China is four times inferior to that of the United States,while their purchasing power is slightly higher. Objectively therefore, with all its faults, Chine has become a freer and more prosperous country than the United States.
This process was predictable from the beginning. Its application was studied for a long time. So, on 1 September 1987, a US forty-year-old published a page of counter-current publicity in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. He warned his compatriots about the rôle that President Bush Sr. was planning to allocate to the United States – to assume and finance out of their own pockets the responsibility for the developing « New World Order ». People read it and laughed. The author of these texts was real estate promoter, Donald Trump.
THE APPLICATION OF THE ECONOMIC MODEL TO INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
One month after the attacks of 11 September 2001, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld nominated his friend Admiral Arthur Cebrowski as Director of the new Office of Force Transformation. He was tasked with changing the culture of the entire US military in order to enable it to respond to a complete change in its mission
There was no longer question of using US armies to defend principles or interests, but to use them for a reorganisation of the world by dividing it into two parts – one one side the states integrated into the globalised economy, and on the other, the others [5].
As late as the 1800’s, the world was “decarbonized” as there were no coal or natural gas power plants, and what the Beverly Hillbillies situation comedies of the 1960’s theme song called “oil that is, black gold, Texas tea”, had not been discovered as something that could be manufactured into usable products.
Before the 1900’s life was hard and dirty, and most people never traveled 100-200 miles from where they were born, and life expectancy was short. Today, crude oil is manufactured into all the products used in the medical industry, fertilizers, electronics and more than 6,000 other products that are the basis of lifestyles and economies.
Now, worldwide efforts are in place to have electricity generated by breezes and sunshine to decarbonize the electricity being generated by coal and natural gas. The “other” fossil fuel of crude oil is caught on the chopping block efforts to eliminate ALL 3 fossil fuels, but crude oil is seldom ever used for electricity generation!
Saule Omarova, who withdrew as Biden’s nominee for Comptroller of the Currency, wants coal, oil, and gas industries ‘to go bankrupt’ is a reflection that she is either oblivious or ignorant to how life and the economies of the world were before 1900. The world had no coal and natural gas generated electricity, nor any of the products, nor fuels manufactured from crude oil needed for airlines, ships, and militaries around the world, as none of those existed before 1900! Had she been confirmed Saule Omarova wanted to push the world back to those decarbonized days of the 1800’s.
As environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors climb up the agenda there is a lost reality that the primary usage of crude oil is NOT for the generation of electricity, but to manufacture derivatives and fuels which are the ingredients of everything needed by economies and lifestyles to exist and prosper. Energy realism requires that the legislators, policymakers, and media that demonstrate pervasive ignorance about crude oil usage understand the staggering scale of the decarbonization challenge.
The oil that reduced infant mortality, extended longevity to more than 80+ and allowed the world to populate to 8 billion in less than two centuries, is now required to provide the food, medical, and communications to maintain and grow that population. How can world leaders consciously support the demise of crude oil?
Just because 2 of the more than 6,000 products manufactured from crude oil are gasoline and diesel fuels for the short-range and light-weight equipment like cars and trucks, why continue to pursue the demise of crude oil? EV technology is making progress to replace those two products from oil. EV owners have demonstrated that their usage of EV’s for approximately 5,000 miles per year represents a real opportunity to meet that short range need with EV’s.
The cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline increased world emissions, and costs to Americans, as that Canadian crude oil is now being transported to the West coast where it is then shipped hallway around the world to China. After China manufacturers the crude oil into usable products, in a country will significantly less environmental controls that America, those products are then shipped back to America via air polluting ships to West Coast ports, for American consumption.
The current passion to implement a world with only intermittent electricity from breezes and sunshine are oblivious to the unintended consequences of a world without crude oil and the manufactured products from that oil.
The signatories to the green movement have failed to imagine how life was without the crude oil infrastructure and those products manufactured from oil that did not exist before 1900 when we had:
NO medications and medical equipment
NO vaccines
NO water filtration systems
NO sanitation systems
NO fertilizers to help feed billions
NO pesticides to control locusts and other pests
NO communications systems, including cell phones, computers, iPhones, and iPads
NO vehicles
NO airlines that now move 4 billion people around the world
NO cruise ships that now move 25 million passengers around the world
NO merchant ships that are moving products throughout the world
NO tires for vehicles
NO asphalt for roads
NO space program.
Wind turbines and solar panels may be able to generate intermittent electricity from breezes and sunshine to partially decarbonize the electric grid, but those renewables cannot manufacture any of the derivatives that come from the “black gold” that are the basis of modern society lifestyles and economies.
Author
Ronald Stein Ron Stein is an engineer who, drawing upon 25 years of project management and business development experience, launched PTS Advance in 1995. He is an author, engineer, and energy expert who writes frequently on issues of energy and economics.
What is behind recent pessimistic appraisals of democracy’s future, from Hillary Clinton, Adam Schiff, Brian Williams and other elite intellectuals, media personalities, and politicians on the Left? Some are warning about its possible erosion in 2024. Others predict democracy’s downturn as early 2022, with scary scenarios of “autocracy” and Trump “coups.”
To answer that question, understand first what is not behind these shrill forecasts.
They are not worried about 2 million foreign nationals crashing the border in a single year, without vaccinations during a pandemic. Yet it seems insurrectionary for a government simply to nullify its own immigration laws.
They are not worried that some 800,000 foreign nationals, some residing illegally, will now vote in New York City elections.
They are not worried that there are formal efforts underway to dismantle the U.S. Constitution by junking the 233-year-old Electoral College or the preeminence of the states in establishing ballot laws in national elections.
They are not worried that we are witnessing an unprecedented left-wing effort to scrap the 180-year-old filibuster, the 150-year-old nine-person Supreme Court, and the 60-year tradition of 50 states, for naked political advantage.
They are not worried that the Senate this year put on trial an impeached ex-president and private citizen, without the chief justice in attendance, without a special prosecutor or witnesses, and without a formal commission report of presidential high crimes and misdemeanors.
They are not worried that the FBI, Justice Department, CIA, Hillary Clinton, and members of the Obama administration systematically sought to use U.S. government agencies to sabotage a presidential campaign, transition, and presidency, via the use of a foreign national and ex-spy Christopher Steele and his coterie of discredited Russian sources.
They are not worried that the Pentagon suddenly has lost the majority support of the American people. Top current and retired officers have flagrantly violated the chain-of-command, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and without data or evidence have announced a hunt in the ranks for anyone suspected of “white rage” or “white supremacy.”
They are not worried that in 2020, a record 64 percent of the electorate did not cast their ballots on Election Day.
Nor are they worried that the usual rejection rate in most states of non-Election Day ballots plunged—even as an unprecedented 101 million ballots were cast by mail or early voting.
And they are certainly not worried that partisan billionaires of Silicon Valley poured well over $400 million into selected precincts in swing states to “help” public agencies conduct the election.
What then is behind this new left-wing hysteria about the supposed looming end of democracy?
It is quite simple.
The Left expects to lose power over the next two years – both because of the way it gained and used it, and because of its radical, top-down agendas that never had any public support.
After gaining control of both houses of Congress and the presidency – with an obsequious media and the support of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, higher education, popular culture, entertainment, and professional sports—the Left has managed in just 11 months to alienate a majority of voters.
The nation has been wracked by unprecedented crime and nonenforcement of the borders. Leftist district attorneys either won’t indict criminals; they let them out of jails or both.
Illegal immigration and inflation are soaring. Deliberate cuts in gas and oil production helped spike fuel prices.
All this bad news is on top of the Afghanistan disaster, worsening racial relations, and an enfeebled president.
Democrats are running 10 points behind the Republicans in generic polls, with the midterms less than a year away.
Joe Biden’s negatives run between 50 and 57 percent—in Donald Trump’s own former underwater territory.
Less than a third of the country wants Biden to run for reelection. In many head-to-head polls, Trump now defeats Biden.
In other words, leftist elites are terrified that democracy will work too robustly.
After the Russian collusion hoax, two impeachments, the Hunter Biden laptop stories, the staged melodramas of the Kavanaugh hearings, the Jussie Smollett con, the Covington kids smear, and the Rittenhouse trial race frenzy, the people are not just worn out by leftist hysterias, but they also weary of how the Left gains power and administers it.
If Joe Biden were polling at 70 percent approval, and his policies at 60 percent, the current doomsayers would be reassuring us of the “health of the system.”
They are fearful and angry not because democracy doesn’t work, but because it does despite their own media and political efforts to warp it.
When a party is hijacked by radicals and uses almost any means necessary to gain and use power for agendas that few Americans support, then average voters express their disapproval.
That reality apparently terrifies an elite.
It then claims any system that allows the people to vote against the Left is not people power at all.
by Tyler Durden
