The imminent collapse of Russia. The sudden rebellion by Wagner troops followed by the equally sudden, non-rebellion had the MSM in a tizzy. Most interesting and hilarious was watching the MSM go from “Wagner mercenaries are murdering Ukrainians” to “Wagner mercenaries are going to free us from Putin’s tyranny.” And, of course, now… silence. To be fair, it’s probably best they just shut up. I am simply stunned that anyone continues to listen to these shills who either spout propaganda or simply have no earthly idea what is going on but feel the need to say… well, something. Surely, it must be getting humiliating at this point?
In any event, here are some thoughts and questions I have after having digested some of what appears to have taken place.
I watched the MSM come out with multiple (I counted 7 and then stopped counting) reports out on the Saturday morning. The fact we had this deluge of reports in such a rapid timeframe seemed odd to me. I mean the “mutiny” had literally only begun taking place hours prior. Hours!
Then we heard that the intelligence agencies briefed Congress earlier in the week about an expected uprising. Earlier in the week? So the spooks at the CIA and Congress knew about this ahead of time. Which means corporate media knew ahead of time. Which explains how they manage to have literally dozens of articles out within hours. They wrote the Russian Civil War narrative beforehand!
Which brings up the question. How did the security services know this was going to go down… before it happened if they weren’t playing a hand in the affair? An attempted Maidan coup 2.0?
If that’s true, then you know what that means? It means that the US has directly attacked Russia. That is an act of war.
Those conclusions, true or not, lead one to consider that maybe, just maybe we have the CIA involved in a foreign country attempting to overthrow its leadership.
Coincidentally the same year the US overthrew the Russian/Ukrainian government because Ukraine accepted a much sweeter Russian economic recovery deal than the EU offered.
If the 9 year NATO/US superpower plan was to install a stand up comic as president, finance a neo-nazi militia running the military and get it’s ass kicked while running out of ammo equals success…I can’t wait to see the NATO/US superpower plan for war with China.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Click the share button above to email/forward this article to your friends and colleagues. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg admitted that the alliance had prepared Ukraine for war with Russia since 2014. At the same time, French Defence Minister Sébastien Lecornu announced on July 12 that the French military has already trained 5,200 Ukrainian troops and plans to train a total of 7,000 troops by year’s end.
“France’s support for Ukraine is not weakening. […] Almost 5,200 Ukrainian soldiers have already been trained by France, including 1,600 in Poland. There will be almost 7,000 by the end of the year,” Lecornu tweeted.
According to Lecornu, Ukrainian troops are learning how to operate French military equipment transferred to them and practice modern combat tactics, such as forming battalions that can manoeuvre as a coherent tactical unit.
Meanwhile, the British government announced that more than 19,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been trained in the country over the past six months and that Ukraine can expect more material support.
“In the past six months, the UK has also expanded its military training programme for Ukrainian recruits. This programme has trained more than 19,000 soldiers to date and training for Ukrainian pilots in the UK will begin this summer,” the British government said in a statement.
The UK, through NATO, also plans to establish a medical rehabilitation centre “to support the recovery and return of soldiers to Ukraine’s lines of defence after being injured in combat.”
“[The British PM announced a] major new tranche of support for Ukraine, including thousands of additional rounds of Challenger 2 ammunition, more than 70 combat and logistics vehicles and a £50m support package for equipment repair,” the statement added.
Although these announcements are recent revelations, NATO training of the Ukrainian military is not new. Stoltenberg said that the Alliance began supporting the Ukrainian military long before the start of the war.
You might say that the immense political and media power of the Greens and eco-warriors is the real reason the West relies on China for REEs.
In other words, could the US ever accept being #2? Doug Casey: Unfortunately, at this point, the US is only number one in dissipation, wokeism, and consumerism.
I am sure the pentagram and US state department have this all figured out.
International Man: What are Rare Earth Elements (REEs), and why are they so important?
Doug Casey: The REEs are a group of 17 elements that you may recall from your high school chemistry class. They take up two rows in the periodic table, sitting by themselves at the bottom of the chart. They’re chemically similar to each other.
REEs are widely dispersed on the Earth’s surface. They aren’t “rare” per se, but since they’re not generally concentrated, you only rarely find deposits that are rich enough to qualify as a mine for elements like germanium, gadolinium, ytterbium, yttrium, or 14 others with exotic and obscure names. They’re basically all minor byproducts of mines for other elements—largely aluminum or zinc. They’ve only recently found significant uses with the development of high-tech, especially electronics and magnets. Fifty years ago, they were basically just chemical curiosities.
The US has one pure REE mine, the Mountain Pass, in the California desert near Nevada. In fact, it’s the only one in the Western hemisphere. Now owned by MP Materials (MP: NYSE $25), I have no opinion on the operation. It went bankrupt under its last owner—perhaps it will do better this time around.
International Man: Former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping once said, “The Middle East has oil. China has rare Earth.”
Today, China dominates the production and processing of REEs.
Why is that?
How likely is it that the US or someone else will be able to break China’s stranglehold soon?
Doug Casey: Deng wasn’t entirely right when he said that. China’s strength in this area isn’t so much in the mining of these things as it is in their processing. Mining any kind of ore is messy and dirty. But processing can be even worse. Smelting takes huge amounts of heat, makes a lot of nasty smoke, and leaves kilotons of toxic waste. Then refining it further takes more of the same, usually plus nasty acids. The Greenies hate mining and refining and try to make them impossible in most places. That’s why so much of it happens in China.
And Silicon Valley is playing, too. Last month YouTube took down multiple videos featuring two different interviews with Kennedy on the grounds that they violated the platform’s policies against “vaccine misinformation”. Youtube is owned by Google, which has had ties to the CIA and NSA since its inception and is now a full-fledged Pentagon contractor.
The New York Times has been churning out an amazing number of hit pieces on Robert F Kennedy Jr lately.
On Tuesday the Times published an audio essay titled “Why I Regret Debating Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” by opinion columnist Farhad Manjoo. Manjoo debated Kennedy in 2006 about the legitimacy of George W Bush’s 2004 win against John Kerry, believing that Kennedy’s skepticism of the election results was dangerous.
“Disputing elections is just not good for democracy,” Manjoo says, joining the rest of the American liberal political/media class in rewriting history to pretend they didn’t just spend the entire Trump administration doing exactly that.
Manjoo cites his experience debating Kennedy (whom he repeatedly refers to as a “conspiracy theorist”) to argue that nobody should debate the presidential candidate on the topic of Covid vaccines, adding yet another entry to the countlessarticles and news segments which were published in the massmedia last month saying that vaccine scientist Peter Hotez should reject Joe Rogan’s offer of $100,000 to a charity of his choice if he’d debate Kennedy on the subject.
Sometimes they’re presented as opinion pieces, sometimes they’re presented as hard news stories despite brazenly biased language and overt editorializing, and all are slanted against Kennedy in some way. The New York Times plainly dislikes RFK Jr, and makes no secret of working to make sure its audience dislikes him too.
And this is pretty much what we can expect from American mass media until Kennedy has either lost his presidential race or had his reputation so thoroughly destroyed among the electorate that he can be safely ignored. The message will be hammered and hammered and hammered home until the illusory truth effect causes readers to mistake rote repetition for truth, and Kennedy’s campaign will fizzle.
The United States has allocated around $113 billion to Ukraine over the last seventeen months, soon to surpass the money spent on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II and quickly approaching the cost of twenty years of war and reconstruction in Afghanistan.
Despite this unprecedented spending, there is no overarching Special Inspector General to oversee the Ukraine funds to root out waste, fraud, and abuse.
Change may be on the horizon. “There will also be a vote this week,” Rep. Tom Massie, R-Ky., tweeted this morning, on establishing the IG for Ukraine.
The push for a Special Inspector General for Ukraine Assistance (SIGUA) has unfortunately become a partisan issue, another casualty of the negative polarization cycle in Washington, D.C. Last March, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., attempted to establish the audit office as an amendment. The bill splintered the Republican caucus in half, while every Democratic Senator, except Sens. Jon Tester, D-Montana, and Jon Ossoff, D-Georgia, voted against it.
“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”
Traffic in our major cities is grinding to a halt. This is especially true during morning and evening “rush” hours (scare quotes around this word since no one is rushing around anywhere, apart from bicyclists and roller skaters, who are just about the fastest movers in this system). All too often, however, this period stretches from 7 am to 7 pm, with barely a diminution during this period of time.
Nor are large cities the only ones suffering from this transportation malady. Here is a case in point: just try moving from the 520 to the 405 in the state of Washington, near Seattle. There are literally miles of cars just creeping along, patiently waiting their turn.
What has government, the owner and manager of our vehicular transportation system, done to rectify this frustrating situation? It has whined to the business community to stagger hours of work. It has urged motorists to car-pool or take buses. But to no avail. There is no evidence whatsoever that this jaw-boning has had any success.
It has also set up express lanes the use of which is limited to vehicles with two or more occupants. This too has failed, since, often, there is back to back traffic on them, too. Further, who is it more important to get to where they are going? Five busboys or cleaning ladies who earn $20 per hour each, for a grand total of $100 hourly, or one doctor, or businessman whose time is worth $500 per hour? Our present rules and regulations vitiate in favor of the former, not the latter. This is due to the fact that express lanes on highways give the nod to automobiles with two or more occupants. The former low wage earners would qualify, but neither of the latter two would do so. They would be confined to one of the bumper to bumper lanes, cooling their heels, while the marginal workers would whiz on by. This brings to mind Thomas Sowell’s famous statement: “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.” Who is in charge of this present irrational system? Bureaucrats in the Department of Transportation.
How would private enterprise handle this challenge? Please do not stop reading at this point, horror struck by the idea that entrepreneurs could actually own and manage our system of streets, roads and highways. Our very first thoroughfares were run on this system. Charges were based on the number of axels, and horses. Even the width of the wagon wheel was considered in the pricing system. The owners of thin wheeled vehicles, think ice skates, were charged more, since they dug ruts into the dirt road. And even nowadays, capitalists run long thin things such as railroads.
Barely two weeks into the Biden presidency, White House Digital Director Rob Flaherty demanded that Twitter “immediately” remove a parody account linked to Biden’s relatives. Twitter leaped to obey, suspending the account within 45 minutes. Twitter officials complained that they were already being “bombarded” by White House censorship requests at that point.
To placate the White House, Facebook suppressed posts “discussing the choice to vaccinate in terms of personal or civil liberties.” That was on par with Facebook’s 2018 debacle where it blocked reposting the Declaration of Independence for violating its hate speech guidelines.
Kazan, Russia – May 4, 2021: The photo illustrates the use of censorship in the social network facebook. Censored in Facebook. Word “CENSORED” on the background of the Facebook logo.
Sometime since January 2021, Biden administration policymakers decided that they were infallible—or a “close enough for government work” level of infallible. They claimed a divine right to suppress the online posts and comments of conservatives and anyone else who had a bad attitude towards federal power. That party ended on July 4 when federal judge Terry Doughty condemned the Biden censorship regime as potentially “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”
Doughty issued a preliminary injunction to ban federal agencies and the White House from browbeating social media companies. The case against Joe Biden was brought by the state attorney generals of Louisiana and Missouri, and joined by several private groups representing censorship victims including Aaron Kheriaty, Martin Kulldorff, Jim Hoft, Jayanta Bhattacharya, and Jill Hines. Doughty declared that his final ruling would likely find First Amendment violations by the White House, Surgeon General, FBI, State Department, and the CDC—all part of the U.S. veering towards “an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”
Doughty delivered 155 pages of stunning, bizarre, and sometimes comical censorship abuses.
Barely two weeks into the Biden presidency, White House Digital Director Rob Flaherty demanded that Twitter “immediately” remove a parody account linked to Biden’s relatives. Twitter leaped to obey, suspending the account within 45 minutes. Twitter officials complained that they were already being “bombarded” by White House censorship requests at that point.
The White House continually denounced Facebook for failing to suppress more posts and videos that could inspire “vaccine hesitancy”—even if the posts were true. Facebook kowtowed to the White House by suppressing posts and comments that do “not contain actionable misinformation.” But the de facto definition of “misinformation” is anything that might deter someone from obeying Biden’s commands. Facebook also sought praise from the White House because it “’labeled and demoted vaccine humor posts whose content could discourage vaccination,” the court decision noted.
Facebook decided the word “liberty” was too hazardous in the Biden era. To placate the White House, Facebook suppressed posts “discussing the choice to vaccinate in terms of personal or civil liberties.” That was on par with Facebook’s 2018 debacle where it blocked reposting the Declaration of Independence for violating its hate speech guidelines.
Flaherty was still unsatisfied and raged at Facebook officials in a July 15, 2021 email: “Are you guys fucking serious?” The following day, President Bidenaccusedsocial media companies of “killing people” by failing to suppress all criticism of covid vaccines. Team Biden threatened social media companies with antitrust cases or other legal penalties if they did not submit.
In October 2020, three experts wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, “a one-page treatise opposing reliance on lockdowns and advocating for an approach to COVID-19 called ‘focused protection,’” the court decision noted. Top federal officials rushed to attack the authors and vilify their recommendations. NIAID Director Anthony Fauci announced, “anybody who knows anything about epidemiology will tell you that is nonsense and very dangerous.” Fauci’s condemnation spurred social media companies to suppress the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration and many other professors, doctors, and other experts who endorsed the declaration.
The Biden censorship deluge was spurred by one of the greatest bureaucratic bait-and-switches in Washington history. After allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Act (CISA) was created to protect against foreign meddling. Prior to Biden taking office, CISA had a “Countering Foreign Influence Task Force.” But in 2021, that was renamed the “Mis, Dis and Malinformation Team (‘MDM Team’).” But all the targets of federal censorship during the Biden era have been Americans.
Federal censorship tainted the 2020 and 2022 elections, spurring the suppression of millions of social media posts (almost all from conservatives). The FBI swayed social media companies to change their policies to ban posts on “hacked materials” and then went along with the Washington fairy tale that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation or hacked—even though the FBI had already confirmed its authenticity.
The Biden administration pressured social media companies “to censor misinformation regarding climate change, gender discussions, abortion, and economic policy,” and the Department of Homeland Security secretly planned to target “inaccurate information” on “racial justice, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of the U.S. support of Ukraine.” During the 2020 election, CISA targeted for suppression assertions such as “mail-in voting is insecure”—despite the long history of absentee ballot fraud. Most of the censorship spurred by federal contractors during the 2020 election cycle targeted posts “related to delegitimizing the election results,” the court decision noted.
