…Just what is the military’s image and reputation? Since Rubin never tells us, I guess I will have to:
Pretending to defend our freedoms
Fighting wars that are not constitutionally declared
Obeying immoral orders
Serving as the president’s personal attack force
Engaging in offense while calling it defense
Going where they have no business going
Fighting unjust and unnecessary wars
Carrying out a reckless, belligerent, and meddling foreign policy
Making widows and orphans
Policing the world
Blindly following orders
Invading and occupying other countries
Bombing, maiming, and killing for the state
Doing the government’s dirty work
Destroying property and infrastructure
Supporting a network of brothels around the world
Helping to create terrorists, insurgents, and militants
This is the image and reputation of the military that we never hear about. Soldiers are not heroes, role models, defenders of freedom, or public servants. They do not protect and defend the Constitution. They are at best pawns in the hands of Uncle Sam, drops of oil in the gears of the war machine, dupes, and cannon fodder.
The Associated Pressreported Thursday that the Biden administration has decided to arm Ukraine with cluster bombs and will announce the munitions as part of a new $800 million arms package. The news comes after Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a report that said Ukraine has killed its own citizens using the munitions.
US officials told AP that they expect the arms package to be announced Friday. The White House used to be opposed to arming Ukraine with cluster munitions, as they are indiscriminate weapons that cause harm to civilians, but the concerns have waned.
Cluster bombs scatter small submunitions over large areas, making them especially hazardous to civilians who can find unexploded munitions years after they were dropped. Because of their indiscriminate nature, cluster munitions have been banned by more than 100 nations. The US, Ukraine, and Russia are not parties to the treaty, known as the Convention on Cluster Munitions.
The HRW report said that Ukrainian cluster munition rocket attacks in the eastern city of Izium in 2022 killed at least eight civilians and wounded 15 more. HRW also said Russia’s use of cluster bombs in the war has killed many civilians.
According to who? Are there really 8 billion humans? Who tells us this? The same people who tell us algorithmic and data lies all day long. The same people who declare at the end of every statistic that the number is an ‘estimate’. Remember when the Data experts declared they would no longer count CoVid cases? They never did count them – Covid data was assimilated by; Wikipedia, NYT, Johns Hopkins, Facebook, Google and various analytics…, including Bill Gates IHME.
The Job Market is showing signs of cratering. Real People – not a Matrix Algorithm – but real people are being laid off in hordes. The Tech market leading the bandwagon is claiming their layoff reaction is due to ‘inflation’. The claim is that during the online Pandemic panic tech firms over-hired. Now they are cleaning slate of superfluous employees, particularly highly qualified ones… Illogical? Absolutely. Yet that is the narrative.
Of the $525 or $700 or $800 billion doled out in PPP Loans, the vast majority of the funds went to the Largest Corporations representing just 5% of businesses. In other words, the PPP Loans which were created to go to small businesses – didn’t. Tech companies were some of the biggest beneficiaries. Revenue took a hit between 2021 vs 2022, yet when compared to 2019 – the spikes were higher by 60%, 80%, and double.
A Subsidy. A Scam. What happened to $800 BILLION?
For Example:META’s income between 2019 and 2022 rose 66%.
Media 2022 – META shares take a 20% DIVE! Media Jan. 2023 – META shares soar 20%. As though it was ‘engineered’. Between 2021 and 2022, Google/Alphabet added 34,000 jobs – an increase of 22%. Same period – profits tanked. For both companies, pretax income in 2021 was stellar. Alphabet’s income in 2021 more than doubled over 2019. It’s revenue to date has risen over $100 billion.
These are not causes for layoffs.
Where are the layoffs coming from?
Many of the tech layoffs are from obscure companies located predominantly in New York and California ~ according to tech-crunch. 212,294 in 2023 so far, and 164,709 in 2022. Shopify declared their layoffs were “due to a need to be more efficient now that the stable economic boom times were over…” Dropbox claimed that their layoffs are due to slowing growth and ‘investments that are no longer sustainable’. META claims it is restructuring. Yahoo also says it is restructuring.
A closer look reveals these companies have been buying back shares since 2019 while incurring debt.
Who benefits from the share buybacks? The same trio: BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street. Fink, Buckley and O’Hanley are the respective CEO’s of these three giants. They Control and Dictate the market, the price of shares, the buys and sells, the media press releases, the news, etc…
The economy is virtually an illusion. White House press briefings continually spike false information to dispel notions that America is in a decline. A monopoly game with fake money. Because in reality, the West ran out of money long ago and has been peddling the shell game for a decade or more.
Example: Germany just announced the purchase of 60 Chinook helicopters from Boeing for a price tag of $7.8 billion. Germany is in the midst of a recession. To pay for the deficit spending, Germany has announced they will borrow an additional $18+ billion in 2024. High unemployment, high inflation, packing on more debt, Germany is simply another Matrix of reality.
Does the US even have ‘gold reserves’ or is that another false piece of data? How Deep Is The MATRIX?
As I noted above there are 3+ accounts on how much PPP loans were distributed. Different media = different facts. Facts are created opinions. Money is allocated – and suddenly it cannot be accounted for. Ukraine aid? The infamous Pentagon Paper Caper wherein they had lost $3 trillion before 9-11. Remember the $1.2 TRILLION infrastructure bill? It was labeled The Bipartisan Infrastructure and Jobs Act. Yet bridges are collapsing, trains derailing and jobs are lost.
Meta claims that over 10 million people had signed up for its Twitter competitor, Threads, in what CEO Mark Zuckerberg framed as a “friendly” alternative to the little blue bird.
“Let’s do this. Welcome to Threads,” wrote Zuckerberg in his first post on the app, which is a “text-based conversation app” where users can publish posts up to 500 characters long, and allows people to post links, photos and videos.
Threads is directly linked to Meta-owned Instagram, which has over 2 billion users. The Twitter competitor is being rolled out in over 100 countries for iOS and Android.
“The goal is to keep it friendly as it expands. I think it’s possible and will ultimately be the key to its success,” wrote Zuckerberg in a Wednesday post, casting the service as a more wholesome substitute to Twitter. “That’s one reason why Twitter never succeeded as much as I think it should have, and we want to do it differently.”
Meanwhile, data privacy and censorship concerns have emerged, with former Twitter owner Jack Dorsey highlighting the vast amount of data collected by Threads.
Within a few hours of launching, Threads was already secretly censoring users and not offering them the right to appeal.
…
Meta is already too powerful. One company controls what much of the public is allowed to see. And if Threads succeeds, it will have 80% of the global market outside of Russia and China, according to one industry insider. As such, it’s reasonable to expect that Meta will censor precisely the same way the large news media corporations, including the New York Times, and corporate advertisers want it to. More censorship is what the mainstream news media, big corporations, and their celebrity pitch people have been demanding.
…additionally, Unlike Twitter, Threads collects data about “Health & Fitness,” “Financial Info,” “Sensitive Info,” and “Other Data.”
What’s ‘other data’?
Shellenberger further noted that within hours of launching, Threads was already secretly censoring users and not offering them the right to appeal.
The answer is that the sociopaths at the UN and in Washington have no real intent for the peasants to continue with their current standard of living. They intend for us all to live in our 15-minute cities, eating bugs, immersed in the metaverse, and hooked up to a neverending feed of pharmaceuticals, which we’ll be forced to take, otherwise your UBI (universal basic income) gets cut off.
Captive in the so-called 15-minute cities, eat bugs and no meat, immerse in the metaverse, and a never ending feed of pharmaceuticals, and all that by force, otherwise your universal basic income (UBI) gets cut off.
Energy? Dirty.
Lower motorway speeds and driving ban in plan to tackle oil reliance. Here’s an extract from Daily Echo article
Lowering motorway speed limits and introducing driving bans on Sunday are ideas being suggested to cut Britain’s reliance on oil.
The ideas are part of a ten-point plan proposed by the International Energy Agency in a bid to reduce global oil demand by 2.7 million barrels per day.
Motorway speed limits would be reduced by 6 mph across the country under the proposals, while the plan also suggests a ban on driving in cities every Sunday.
This is horseshit! It has nothing to do with “reducing reliance on oil” and everything to do with the WEF and UN “sustainable development Agenda 2030.”
You know what’s going to happen? The existing stream of folks leaving countries implementing these policies will turn into a flood (more on this in a minute). With it will come capital controls, because the sociopaths driving this agenda will never see their own policies as the problem. No, it’s always those silly peasants who are the problem.
In case you’re wondering… that’s you.
Meat? Dirty.
Irish considering massive cattle culling. We are flabbergasted that killing 200,000 head of cattle is even a consideration…
Wasn’t Ireland “famous” for its potato famine? You would think that people would learn from history. I am coming to the view that little/nothing is learnt by studying history.
When will folks wake up to this delusional stuff going on? Perhaps when their living standards take a bat to the knees.
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The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations (CoA), a highly influential US Congressional body on US budget proposals, has advised cutting government funding for the World Health Organization (WHO) entirely, as part of its budget proposal for fiscal year 2024.
The CoA’s bill would also block funding to the Chinese Wuhan Institute of Virology, the EcoHealth Alliance, as well as gain-of-function research. In addition, the legislation would terminate US government involvement in the World Economic Forum (WEF).
This bombshell report was published a few days ago by RFK Jr’s Defender, based on extensive interviews with concerned US Congress people. See this full report by Michael Nevradikis, Ph.D, a regular contributor to the Children’s Health Defense Newsletter.
The proposal would enhance the US government’s attempt to ban “misinformation” and “disinformation” programs, and to retain – and even bring back – the US’s Constitutional sovereignty and citizen’s right to free speech and expression.
Cutting US funding to the WHO would amount to about US$ 700 million savings per year. With Big Pharma, Bill Gates and other interest groups funding more than 80% of WHO’s budget, the US$ 700 million – though by far the largest country contribution to the “health organization”, may not be a lot, but it has significant symbolic and political meaning.
Other nations look to the US, since many, especially from the Global South, are fed-up with WHO’s scandalous Covid imposition during the past three years, WHO’s impending health tyranny through the planned revised International Health Regulations (IHR) and the fully integrated so-called “Pandemic Treaty”. If the US dares take this drastic, but necessary step, others who feel likewise may follow suit.
While the candlemakers of the world may want to use the government to deprive us completely of sunlight, we must not go the other direction and act as though we have a so-called right to the sun. While, obviously, sun rights are not the battle of today, every time we hear an advocate coming out with a different idea of new positive rights, we must remember that each and every one of them is as ridiculous as a right to the sun.
When we think of “solar power,” we picture a field or a roof full of glass panels churning out electricity. However, this is just a more recent development in channeling the sun’s energy. Most histories of solar power will begin with stories regarding the use of magnifying glasses and mirrors to make fire. From the first to fourth centuries, the Romans began including large south-facing windows in their famous bathhouses, optimizing the heat energy the sun provided to heat the buildings.
However, this led to an interesting development. In the sixth century, not only bathhouses but also many Roman houses and public buildings all trended toward having a sunroom. As such, the Justinian Code actually enshrined “sun rights” so that each individual would be guaranteed access to the sun. Once the government enshrines access to the sun as a right, it is easy to compare “sun rights” to Murray Rothbard’s hypothetical government’s right to shoes:
The libertarian who wants to replace government by private enterprises in the above areas is thus treated in the same way as he would be if the government had, for various reasons, been supplying shoes as a tax-financed monopoly from time immemorial. If the government and only the government had a monopoly of the shoe manufacturing and retailing business, how would most of the public treat the libertarian who now came along to advocate that the government get out of the shoe business and throw it open to private enterprise? He would undoubtedly be treated as follows: people would cry, “How could you? You are opposed to the public, and to poor people, wearing shoes! And who would supply shoes to the public if the government got out of the business? Tell us that! Be constructive! It’s easy to be negative and smart-alecky about government; but tell us who would supply shoes? Which people? How many shoe stores would be available in each city and town? How would the shoe firms be capitalized? How many brands would there be? What material would they use? What lasts? What would be the pricing arrangements for shoes? Wouldn’t regulation of the shoe industry be needed to see to it that the product is sound? And who would supply the poor with shoes? Suppose a poor person didn’t have the money to buy a pair?”
Once the right to sun is enshrined, all these same questions can be asked. A sunroom raises the price of a home, and the poor will be priced out without a guaranteed right to the sun. One could cry that if one didn’t support this right, one would be opposed to people having sun and receiving vitamin D. In fact, there is a stronger argument to regulate the sun. While the sun is not an economic good—it is not scarce—it far more meets the definition of a public good than shoes do.
Speaking before the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute Tuesday, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley laid out a hawkish policy for China. Sharply critical of the Biden administration’s alleged ineptitude in confronting China, Haley, who served briefly as Donald Trump’s UN ambassador, made a series of proposals that were actually not all that different from the current policy, only with a greater emphasis on economic decoupling and a dash of extra fearmongering.
She would take a policy that is already heavy on building up the military and coercive tactics against Beijing and make it heavier yet. This is unfortunately typical of the debate over China policy in this country. It is often taken for granted that the only “realistic” alternative to the current policy of containment and rivalry is a more intense and reckless version of the same. But America deserves better options.
Notably lacking in Haley’s plan is any discussion of positive economic statecraft in the Asia-Pacific region, diplomatic engagement with non-aligned countries, or working with Beijing on mitigating the effects of climate change. On bilateral trade, her only suggestion was to reduce it due to the role played by Chinese manufacturers in the fentanyl crisis. In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that previewed her speech, she wrote, “I will push Congress to revoke permanent normal trade relations [with China] until the flow of fentanyl ends.”
If the U.S. acted on this threat, it would result in significant costs for American businesses and consumers, but Haley spoke as if revoking PNTR would harm only China. Moreover, during questions afterward, Haley entertained the possibility of “full-on decoupling” from China if it was “necessary” for national security. The former governor and ambassador sounded every bit like the hardline ideologue that we saw during the Trump years.
At one point in her speech, she called Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Beijing a “gold-plated invitation for more Chinese aggression.” She later tried to walk this back a little during the questions, saying that she objected to the way that the Biden administration was doing things, but it’s hard to see what kind of diplomatic engagement with China she would support other than issuing threats and ultimatums.
Like other hawkish critics of Biden’s China policy, Haley ignored much of what Biden has done that those critics support while emphasizing the president’s supposed weakness. For what it’s worth, the Biden administration recently made an effort to address the crisis directly when it expanded interdiction efforts by the Department of Homeland Security. To the extent that she acknowledged any of what Biden has done on export controls, it was only to fault him for not going far enough. She wants the U.S. to “deepen” military ties with regional allies and with India, but then this is exactly what Biden has been doing for the last two years.
The ability of client states to drag their patrons into conflicts is as old as Thucydides, as is their use of powerful interest groups within that patron state to influence policy decisions.
Republicans are terrible on China. Examples abound, but perhaps the most instructive illustration of this long-term handicap comes from the following quotation:
“We must be prepared to go it alone in China if our allies desert us. We must not fool ourselves into thinking we can avoid taking up arms with the Chinese Reds. If we don’t fight them in China and Formosa [Taiwan] we’ll be fighting them in San Francisco, in Seattle, in Kansas City.”1
This wasn’t excerpted from a recent speech by Senator Tom Cotton (R-AK). Rather, it was by then-Senate Majority Leader William Knowland (R-CA), in the January 1954 edition of Collier’s Magazine. While perhaps particularly rabid in his Sinophobia, President Dwight D. Eisenhower privately opined that “Knowland has no foreign policy, except to develop high blood pressure whenever he mentions ‘Red China’…In his case, there seems to be no final answer to the question, ‘How stupid can you get?’”2 The parallels between Knowland’s time and our own are significant. Representing the respective nadirs of Sino-American relations, they are worth considering in depth.
First, a necessary bit of high-level background.
In 1949 Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party defeated the nominally republican forces of Chiang Kai-shek. Despite internal warnings that this was likely to happen, Chiang and his nationalist cronies being “thieves, every last one of them…corrupt as they come” according to President Harry Truman, this kicked off a firestorm in Washington3. “Who lost China?” subsequently became a driving force of the Second Red Scare that consumed American politics, distorting perceptions and constraining the ability of even the most powerful figures, such as Eisenhower or Secretary of State Dean Acheson, to act towards China in the more rational manner they would have liked.
Dean Acheson had presciently forecast as early as 1950 that Mao could be an “Asian Tito,” a disruptor of communist unity akin to the Yugoslav leader, Josip Broz Tito, Stalin’s bête noire. As things happened, however, the powerful China Lobby, led by men such as the editor of Time Henry Luce, was predictably able to push policy in the opposite direction.
For his part, Chiang refused to acknowledge defeat and demanded help retaking the mainland.While Eisenhower had bowed to domestic pressure to “unleash Chiang” in 1953, removing American impediments to cross-Strait engagement, further American support was not (yet) forthcoming. While Chiang’s friends worked on Washington, succeeding in securing for him more American planes and bombs, Chiang sought to do what he could to make life difficult for the new communist regime in Beijing. His policy of “Guanbi,” or “closed port policy,” involved the interdicting of foreign vessels bound for the mainland, eventually some one hundred in total.
The provocative policy prevented necessary trade and led to a series of skirmishes and several deaths, playing a larger role in precipitating what would come to be known as the First Taiwan Straits Crisis. In 1954 Chiang decided to fortify Quemoy and Matsu, islands so close to mainland China they’re visible from the shore on a clear day.
Predictably, the islands quickly came under bombardment by PRC forces. Resisting calls by the Joint Chiefs to either place U.S. troops in Taiwan or unleash nuclear weapons on mainland China, Eisenhower felt forced into the next worst thing. Concluding, in the words of Patterson, that “it would be politically risky to do nothing,” Eisenhower formalized the American commitment to defend Taiwan in the event of an attack. In making this commitment Eisenhower was careful to exclude islands such as Quemoy and Matsu, while also securing from Chiang a promise to cease unilateral military actions against the mainland.
MCViewPoint 
