Tuesday, April 30, 2019

pcr sums up the insanity of 'our' government and the way the world increasingly agrees;


Humpty Dumpty Has Had a Great Fall
Paul Craig Roberts
While the crazed and corrupt people who comprise the Democratic Party and US print and TV media continue to insist that Russiagate is real, a very real threat is emerging in Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. The threat arises from the fact that Washington has taught each country to have no trust in America’s veracity. The governments of the four countries have learned that everything Washington says is a lie.
Moreover, the countries have learned that Washington does not accept their sovereignty and objects to their existence. Each of the four countries has experienced sanctions designed to overthrow their governments or cause them to submit to Washington’s will.
Russia long ago saw through Washington’s disingenuous claim that the missile ring that Washington has arrayed around Russia is defensive and directed against (non-existent) Iranian missiles. Putin has said many times that the “defensive” missiles can easily and quickly be converted into nuclear armed offensive missiles that leave Russia no response time. I have always been amazed at the utter stupidity of the Polish and Romanian governments for accepting these American missiles. No doubt the Polish and Romanian officials were paid handsome bribes, but money is no good to a dead person. You can bet your life that the Russians are not going to permit such operable weapons to be on Russian borders during a time of high tensions that exists today between the West and Russia......https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/04/29/humpty-dumpty-has-had-a-great-fall/

if you think you know the reality of life in gaza because your tv told you what you believe, i suggest you read the following article;


If you have read a recent New York Times op-ed entitled “Care about Gaza? Blame Hamas” written by none other than the White House “special representative for international negotiations” Jason Greenblatt you would understand that the misery being experienced by Palestinians in Gaza is all their own fault. Greenblatt, who is Jewish of the Orthodox persuasion, just happens to be a strong supporter of Israel’s settlements, which he claims are “not an obstacle to peace.” He is very upset because some naysayers are actually putting some of the blame for the human catastrophe in Gaza on Israel, which we Americans all know is our best friend in the whole world and our most loyal ally. If that were not so, the New York Times and those fine people in Congress and the White House would surely inform us otherwise. And anyway, what are a few lies and war crimes between friends?
Greenblatt, who knows nothing about foreign policy and diplomacy apart from advising Donald Trump on Israel while serving as the Trump Organization chief legal officer, is supposed to be working hard with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner negotiating “deal of the century” peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Betting is that the arrangement on offer in June will consist of American acquiescence in Israel declaring sovereignty over nearly all of land that the Arabs still hold on the West Bank with the remaining local population being bribed heavily to either move to Jordan or stay in designated non-Jewish sectors and stop complaining.
Jason Greenblatt is a perfect example of the type of “dual” loyalist who cannot appreciate that his overriding religious and ethnic allegiances are incompatible with genuine loyalty to the United States. Willingness to subordinate actual American interests to a those of a foreign nation means that he and others like him are contributing to the decline and fall of the country he was born in and which has made him wealthy. If he had any real integrity, when presented by Trump with the opportunity to benefit Israel at the expense of the United States he should have declined the offer knowing that he would inevitably be biased, making it impossible for him to fairly consider either American interests or those of the Palestinians............http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/blame-palestinians-for-gaza/
do you feel like you're getting your money's worth?;


Global military expenditure reached its highest level last year since the end of the Cold War, fueled by increased spending in the United States and China, the world’s two biggest economies, a leading defence think-tank said on Monday.
In its annual report, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said overall global military spending in 2018 hit $1.82 trillion, up 2.6 percent on the previous year.
That is the highest figure since 1988, when such data first became available as the Cold War began winding down.
U.S. military spending rose 4.6 percent last year to reach $649 billion, leaving it still by far the world’s biggest spender. It accounted for 36 percent of total global military expenditure, nearly equal to the following eight biggest-spending countries combined, SIPRI said.
China, the second biggest spender, saw military expenditure rise 5.0 percent to $250 billion last year, the 24th consecutive annual increase...........https://www.cryptogon.com/?p=54867

Monday, April 29, 2019

kunstler always speaks of the reality of our world/situation in the face of all of the 'happy talk' your tv provides, and here is a summation;


How to account for Americans being the most anxious, fearful, and stressed-out people among the supposedly advanced nations? Do we not live in the world’s greatest democratic utopia where dreams come true?
What if the dreaming part is actually driving us insane? What if we have engineered a society in which fantasy has so grotesquely over-run reality that coping with daily life is nearly impossible. What if an existence mediated by pixel screens large and small presents a virtual world more compelling than the real world and turns out to be a kind of contagious avoidance behavior — until reality is so fugitive that we can barely discern its colors and outlines beyond the screens?
You end up in a virtual world of advertising and agit-prop where manipulation is the primary driver of human activity. That is, a world where the idea of personal liberty (including any act of free thought) becomes a philosophical sick joke, whether you believe in the possibility of free will or not. You get a land full of college kids trained to think that coercion of others is the highest-and-best use of their time on earth — and that it represents “inclusion.” You get a news industry that makes its own reality, churning out narratives (i.e. constructed psychodramas) to excite numbed minds. You get politics that play out like a Deputy Dawg cartoon. You get a corporate tyranny of racketeering that herds spellbound citizens like so many sheep into chutes for shearing, not only of their money, but their autonomy, dignity, and finally their will to live.
Can a people recover from such an excursion into unreality? The USA’s sojourn into an alternative universe of the mind accelerated sharply after Wall Street nearly detonated the global financial system in 2008. That debacle was only one manifestation of an array of accumulating threats to the postmodern order, including the burdens of empire, onerous global debt, population overshoot, fracturing globalism, worries about energy, disruptive technologies, ecological havoc, and the specter of climate change — things that hurt to think about...........https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/tom-petty-was-right/
only two minutes into this eleven minute video and already it seems a good bet to post it here as you hear things like no one seems to stand still while they are replaced by others. you will hear hard times are coming and many of you won't be able to cope;


https://youtu.be/_CfMvsU11ao
i guess i'm bound to repeat myself and here i go again. i love what this blogger has to say and so post everyone of them here;


What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I think there are 22 Democrat candidates for President. I admire some for their resistance to the Jewish Lobby. But not one of them is opposed to cutting our wages and pensions 50% or more.
I base my claim on the behavior of our politicians and not their words. I saw an NPR clip last week about a Mexican woman living near Disney Land with her 5 children in a garage without a shower. Her rent was $1,000 a month. Her salary was equal to the new and much higher minimum wage that all liberals support. Immigration had so impacted rents in Orange county California that even a $20 an hour minimum wage would not solve her problems housing and feeding herself and 5 children.
So what is wrong with this picture? She is one of 132 million Mexican citizens. Her 5 children are 5 of 34  million Mexican Americans. There are 132 million Mexican citizens of whom at least 10 million are living illegally in America.
One problem we will face in the 2020 elections is that rents have not yet gone through the ceiling in the rest of America so voters have not yet been impacted. You would have a hard time renting out a garage to a family of 6 in Tulsa Oklahoma for $1,000 a month. Voters in 2020 who have not yet felt the impact of open borders  might feel sympathy for the argument that borders are racist.
The other and more serious long term problem is that America had to import natural resources starting back in 1950 when our population went above 150 million. They only reason the gas station nearest me is only charging $2.59 a gallon is that our politicians have allowed energy companies to poison us by fracking for oil.
Our politicians chose to print tens of trillions of dollars to give voters the illusion of American prosperity to cover the reality of bitter poverty. Politicians ran deficits to create 31 million state, local and federal jobs with subsidized high wages and fantastic benefits. They also printed trillions of dollars to buy things like cars, electronics, phones, appliances, clothes and food from overseas with I Owe You Nothing Federal Reserve Notes..........https://vidrebel.wordpress.com/2019/04/29/senator-why-do-you-want-to-cut-our-wages-and-pensions-50/
one more time a meme says it well;