War and Empire Links: April 2018

The League of Assad-Loving Conspiracy Theorists. CJ Hopkins, CounterPunch. Apr. 26, 2018.

So the global capitalist ruling classes’ War on Dissent is now in full swing. With their new and improved official narrative, “Democracy versus the Putin-Nazis,” successfully implanted in the public consciousness, the corporatocracy have been focusing their efforts on delegitimizing any and all forms of deviation from their utterly absurd and increasingly paranoid version of reality. 

The Democratic Party is suing Russia, the Trump campaign, and Wikileaks (seriously … they’ve filed an actual lawsuit in an actual court of law an everything) for launching “an all-out assault on democracy” by publishing the DNC’s emails, “an act of unprecedented treachery,” according to Party Chairman Tom Perez. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, having already spent the last six years in a room in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid being arrested by the British authorities, extradited to the United States, and imprisoned for the remainder of his natural life, has been cut off from the outside world in order to prevent him from further “interfering” with democracy by expressing his opinions. 

In Syria, where the “international community” has been battling the “global terrorist threat” by supporting moderate jihadist militias intent on overthrowing the government and establishing a fundamentalist theocracy, the corporate media have been hard at work sanctifying the official story of the “chemical weapons attack” in Douma. According to this story, Bashar al-Assad, an uncooperative brutal dictator whom the corporatocracy has been trying to replace with a more cooperative brutal dictator, dropped a lot of chlorine gas bombs (and possibly sarin, the deadly nerve agent), onto a house full of innocent babies. He did this on the eve of victory over those moderate jihadist militias the “international community” has been supporting in their eight-year attempt to take over his country, slaughter him and his entire family, mount their severed heads on spikes, implement nationwide Sharia law, and then go out hunting homosexuals and heretics to gruesomely behead on YouTube. The evacuation of these freedom fighters was already being negotiated, but Assad didn’t want to miss his last chance to sadistically gas a lot of women and children and have the Western corporate media broadcast his war crimes throughout the world, or something more or less along those lines. 

This gratuitous baby-gassing massacre could not be allowed to go unpunished, so Emmanuel Macron and other senior members of the “international community” hauled Trump in off a golf course somewhere (or wrestled him away from the Gorilla Channel) and ordered him to order a completely pointless one hundred fifty million dollar series of “retaliatory” missile strikes on assorted uninhabited buildings containing zero chemical weapons and of absolutely no strategic value. The corporate media and their paid menagerie of military experts and other talking heads took to the airwaves to celebrate this demonstration of international “resolve,” as did investors in Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics. 

The celebrations were short-lived, however, as the corporate media needed to immediately turn their attention to aggressively countering the malicious disinformation campaign being waged by the infamous International Putin-Nazi Propaganda Network (i.e., anyone capable of critical thinking). Reports by journalists actually in Syria, like Robert Fisk of The Independent, casting doubt on the official story needed to be strenuously ignored, ridiculed, and delegitimized. Fisk, a respected, award-winning journalist who has covered the Middle East for over four decades, had clearly been duped by his Putin-Nazi minders into publishing pro-Assad propaganda. Just as clearly, any actual Syrians contradicting the official story (which the corporate media had scrupulously fact-checked with the US military and intelligence agencies) had been intimidated into doing so by Putin-Nazi-Assadist death squads. 

But Fisk and the Syrians are small potatoes compared to the discord-sowing threat posed by the International League of Assad-Loving Twitter Conspiracy Theorists, a decentralized network of “anti-Western,” “pro-Assad,” extremist traitors led by people like Sarah Abdallah, a shadowy figure whose current whereabouts the BBC is still trying to pinpoint (and presumably report to MI6), and Vanessa Beeley, an independent journalist who writes about Syria for an “extreme right” website, speaks to “fringe groups,” and has appeared on RT, which the BBC is at pains to remind us is a “state-owned” media organization. 

This nefarious network of dissension-sowers is also responsible for the “4000 percent increase” in Putin-Nazi propaganda in the wake of the Poisoned Porridge Attack that “Russia” carried out in Salisbury in March, in which operatives allegedly smeared the doorknob of a former Russian intelligence officer and his daughter with oatmeal laced with Novichok, “the deadliest nerve agent ever devised,” instead of, well, you know, just shooting the guy, or throwing him out of an upper-floor window. Despite the potency of this lethal nerve agent, which, for some reason, “can only be made in Russia,” both victims are expected to completely recover. Tragically, their cat and guinea pigs, having also managed to survive the attack, were slowly starved to death by the police, presumably out of an abundance of caution. 

In any event, according to the diligent, authoritative investigative journalists at The Guardian, following this brazen porridge attack, “automated bots” “based in Russia,” like @Partisangirl and @Ian56789, spread Putin-Nazi disinformation to millions of unknowing Twitter users in an attempt to “undermine the international system” (whatever that’s supposed to mean). As it turns out, @Partisangirl is just a human being and not a robot at all, and @Ian56789 is just a feisty British pensioner who is tired of being routinely lied to by the government and the corporate media … unless, of course, he’s a sleeper agent just posing as a feisty pensioner, which he hasn’t been able to conclusively disprove to the satisfaction of the corporate media. (Watch Ian being interrogated by a Sky News Russian Bot-Hunting Team and judge his loyalties for yourself!) 

These are just a few examples of how the global capitalist ruling classes and their mouthpieces in the corporate media have been generating an atmosphere of mindless hysteria and paranoia in the service of drawing “a line in the sand” between neoliberalism (i.e., global capitalism) and any and all forms of dissent therefrom. They’ve been at this, relentlessly, for almost two years now, since they recognized they were being confronted with a bona fide widespread “populist” insurgency against the hegemony of global capitalism, not just in the Greater Middle East, but right in the heart of the Western empire. 

I’ve been writing about this since 2016, so I’m not going to try to rehash all that here. The short version is, Western societies are being divided into two opposing camps … two extremely broad ideological camps, both of which encompass the traditional political division into left and right. Let’s call camp number one “the Normals” (i.e., those who support and conform to the values and ideology of global capitalism, regardless of whether they identify as conservatives, liberals, neoliberals, neoconservatives, or anything else). Let’s call camp number two “the Extremists” (i.e., those opposing global capitalism, or not conforming to its ideology, regardless of whether they identify as socialists, communists, anarchists, fascists, anti-fascists, jihadists, or whatever). 

While, of course, real political conflict still takes place within each of these two broad camps, the global capitalist ruling classes are less concerned with the “left/right” equation than they are with “Normal/Extremist” equation. This is the battle they are fighting currently. Short some sort of miraculous event, it is a battle they are going to win. They are going to win it by demonizing anyone opposing global capitalism as one or another form of “extremist” … an Islamic terrorist, an Antifa terrorist, a white supremacist, a Black identity extremist, an anti-Semite, a conspiracy theorist, an Assad apologist, a Russian bot, a Putin-Nazi propagandist … or whatever. It doesn’t really matter which labels they use. The point is, anyone not conforming to the global capitalist version of reality is an enemy of all that is normal and good. 

In an atmosphere of mass hysteria and paranoia (like the one we’re living in at the moment), the authorities’ narratives do not have to make sense, or stand up to any type of real scrutiny. Their primary purpose is not to deceive, but rather, to demarcate an ideological territory of acceptable belief, expression, and emotion to which “normal” people are expected to conform. Beyond the boundaries of that territory lies the outer darkness of “abnormality” and “extremism,” which no “normal” person wants anything to do with. To avoid being cast into this outer darkness, people will conform to the most absurd and paranoid nonsense you can possibly imagine. The global capitalist ruling classes know this, which is why they don’t care if you disprove their narratives on Twitter or some “disreputable” website they’ve rendered virtually invisible anyway. They are not debating the facts or the truth … they are marking the boundaries of that “normal” territory, and herding frightened people into it. 

This article in Haaretz by Alexander Reid Ross, a lecturer at Portland State University who has been publishing (or attempting to publish) a series of rather paranoid pieces smearing people he disagrees with as neo-Strasserist sleeper agents, provides an extreme but clear example of what Western governments and the corporate media have been doing, albeit on a much subtler level. Read the piece through if you can possibly stand it. You will be told how people like Michael Savage, Rania Khalek, Alex Jones, Breitbart’s entire UK office, Cenk Ugyur, Max Blumenthal, Caitlin Johnstone, Glenn Greenwald, The Nation‘s Stephen F. Cohen, Tucker Carlson, Vanessa Beeley (again), various British fascists, Jeremy Corbyn, and that modern-day Rasputin, Lyndon LaRouche, are all parts of the insidious Putin-Nazi plot to … well, I’m not sure, exactly, but I’m pretty sure it has something to do with killing Jews and gassing babies. 

Would you like to be associated with people like that … Assad-loving, Putin-supporting Nazis? No? Then stop and think very carefully before sharing, “liking,” or commenting on this essay.

Weapons Inspector Refutes U.S. Syria Chemical Claims. Dennis Bernstein, Consortium News. Apr. 27, 2018.

Scott Ritter is arguably the most experienced American weapons inspector and in this interview with Dennis J. Bernstein he levels a frank assessment of U.S. government assertions about chemical weapons use.

In the 1980’s, Scott Ritter was a commissioned officer in the United States Marine Corps, specializing in intelligence. In 1987, Ritter was assigned to the On-Site Inspection Agency, which was put together to go into the Soviet Union and oversee the implementation of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty. This was the first time that on-site inspection had been used as part of a disarmament verification process.

Ritter was one of the ground-breakers in developing on-site inspection techniques and methodologies. With this unique experience behind him, Ritter was asked in 1991, at the end of the Gulf War, to join the United Nations Special Commission, which was tasked by the Security Council to oversee the disarmament of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. From 1991 to 1998, Ritter served as a chief weapons inspector and led a number of teams into Iraq.

According to Ritter, in the following Flashpoints Radio interview with Dennis Bernstein conducted on April 23rd, US, British and French claims that the Syrian Government used chemical weapons against civilians last month appear to be totally bogus. 

Dennis Bernstein: You have been speaking out recently about the use of chemical weapons in Syria. Could you outline your case? 

Scott Ritter: There are a lot of similarities between the Syrian case and the Iraqi case. Both countries possess weapons of mass destruction. Syria had a very large chemical weapons program. 

In 2013 there was an incident in a suburb of Damascus called Ghouta, the same suburb where the current controversy is taking place. The allegations were that the Syrian government used sarin nerve agent against the civilian population. The Syrian government denied that, but as a result of that incident the international community got together and compelled Syria into signing the Chemical Weapons Convention, declaring the totality of its chemical weapons holdings, and opening itself to be disarmed by inspections of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Russia was chosen to be the guarantor of Syria’s compliance. The bottom line is that Syria had the weapons but was verified by 2016 as being in 100% compliance. The totality of Syria’s chemical weapons program was eliminated. 

At the same time that this disarmament process was taking place, Syria was being engulfed in a civil war which has resulted in a humanitarian crisis. Over a half million people have died. It is a war that pits the Syrian government against a variety of anti-regime forces, many of which are Islamic in nature: the Islamic State, Al Nusra, Al Qaeda. Some of these Islamic factions have been in the vicinity of Ghouta since 2012. 

Earlier this year, the Syrian government initiated an offensive to liberate that area of these factions. It was very heavy fighting, thousands of civilians were killed, with massive aerial bombardment. Government forces were prevailing and by April 6 it looked as if the militants were preparing to surrender. 

Suddenly the allegations come out that there was this chemical weapons attack. It wasn’t a massive chemical weapons attack, it was dropping one or two so-called “barrel bombs,” improvised devices that contained chlorine gas canisters. According to the militants, between 40 and 70 people were killed and up to 500 people were made ill. The United States and other nations picked up on this, saying that this was proof positive that Syria has been lying about its chemical weapons program and that Russia has been behind Syria’s retention of chemical weapons. This is the case the US made to launch its missile strike [on April 14]. 

There are a lot of problems with this scenario. Again, why would the Syrian government, at the moment of victory, use a pinprick chemical attack with zero military value? It added nothing to the military campaign and invited the wrath of the West at a critical time, when the rebels were begging for Western intervention. 

Many, including the Russian government, believe that this was a staged event. There has been no hard evidence put forward by anyone that an attack took place. Shortly after allegations of the attack came out, the entire town of Douma was taken over by the Syrian Army while the rebels were evacuated. 

The places that were alleged to have been attacked were inspected by Russian chemical weapons specialists, who found zero trace of any chemicals weapons activity. The same inspectors who oversaw the disarmament of Syria were mobilized to return to Syria and do an investigation. They were supposed to start their work this past weekend [April 21-22]. They arrived in Damascus the day after the missile strikes occurred but they still haven’t been out to the sites. The United States, France and Great Britain have all admitted that the only evidence they have used to justify this attack were the photographs and videotapes sent to them by the rebel forces. 

I have great concern about the United States carrying out an attack on a sovereign nation based on no hard evidence. The longer we wait, the longer it takes to get inspectors onto the site, the more claims we are going to get that the Russians have sanitized it. I believe that the last thing the United States wanted was inspectors to get on-site and carry out a forensic investigation that would have found that a chemical attack did not in fact take place. 

DB: It is sort of like cleaning up a police crime scene before you check for evidence. 

SR: The United States didn’t actually bomb the site that was attacked. They bombed three other facilities. One was in the suburbs of Damascus, a major metropolitan area. The generals said that they believed there were quantities of nerve agent there. So, in a building in a densely populated area where we believe nerve agent is stored, what do we do? We blow it up! If there had in fact been nerve agent there, it would have resulted in hundreds or even thousands of deaths. That fact that nobody died is the clearest evidence yet that there was no nerve agent there. The United States is just winging it, making it up. 

One of the tragedies is that we can no longer trust our military, our intelligence services, our politicians. They will manufacture whatever narrative they need to justify an action that they deem to be politically expedient. 

DB: Isn’t it also the case that there were problems with the allegations concerning Syria using chemical weapons in 2013 and then again in 2015? I believe The New York Times had to retract their 2013 story. 

SR: They put out a story about thousands of people dying, claiming that it was definitely done by the Syrian government. It turned out later that the number of deaths was far lower and that the weapons systems used were probably in the possession of the rebels. It was a case of the rebels staging a chemical attack in order to get the world to intervene on their behalf. 

A similar scenario unfolded last year when the Syrian government dropped two or three bombs on a village and suddenly there were reports that there was sarin nerve agent and chlorine gas wafting through the village, killing scores of people. Videotapes were taken of dead and dying and suffering people which prompted Trump to intervene. Inspectors never went to the site. Instead they relied upon evidence collected by the rebels. 

As a weapons inspector, I can tell you that chain of custody of any samples that are to be used in the investigation is an absolute. You have to be at the site when it is collected, it has to be certified to be in your possession until the laboratory. Any break in the chain of custody makes that evidence useless for a legitimate investigation. So we have evidence collected by the rebels. They videotaped themselves carrying out the inspection, wearing training suits that would not have protected them at all from chemical weapons! Like almost everything having to do with these rebels, this was a staged event, an act of theater. 

DB: Who has been supporting this particular group of rebels? 

SR: On the one hand, we have the actual fighters, the Army of Islam, a Saudi-backed fundamentalist group who are extraordinarily brutal. Embedded within the fighters are a variety of Western-trained and Western-funded NGOs such as the White Helmets and the Syrian-American Medical Society. But their primary focus isn’t rescue, in the case of the White Helmets, or medical care in the case of the Syrian-American Medical Society, but rather anti-regime propaganda. Many of the reports that came out of Douma originated with these two NGO’s. 

DB: You mentioned “chain of custody.” That’s what was most ridiculous about sending in inspectors. The first thing you would want to do is establish chain of custody and nail down the crime scene. 

SR: I was a participant in the Gulf War and we spent the bulk of that war conducting a massive aerial campaign against Iraq. I was one of the people who helped come up with the target list that was used to attack. Each target had to have a purpose. 

Let’s look what happened in Syria [on April 14]. We bombed three targets, a research facility in Damascus and two bunker facilities in western Syria. It was claimed that all three targets were involved with a Syrian chemical weapons program. But the Syria weapons program was verified to be disarmed. So what chemical weapons program are we talking about? Then US officials said that one of these sites stored sarin nerve agent and chemical production equipment. That is a very specific statement. Now, if Syria was verified to be disarmed last year, with all this material eliminated, what are they talking about? What evidence do they have that any of this material exists? They just make it up.  

If I had been a member of that inspections team, I would have been able to tell you with 100% certainty what took place at that site. It wasn’t that long ago that the allegations took place, there are very good forensic techniques that can be applied. We would be able to reverse engineer that site and tell you exactly what happened when. Let’s say an inspection team had gone in and we found that there was sarin nerve agent. Now, the US government can say, there is not supposed to be any sarin nerve agent in Syria, therefore we can state that the Syrians have a covert sarin nerve agent capability. But still you don’t know where it is, so now you have to say we assess that it could be in this bunker.

We bombed empty buildings. We didn’t degrade Syria’s chemical weapons capability. They got rid of it. We were among the nations that certified that they had been disarmed. We just created this phantom threat out of nothing so that we could attack Syria and our president could be seen as being presidential, as being the commander in chief at a time when his credibility was being attacked on the home front. 

DB: Amazing. That helps clarify the situation. Of course, it also leaves us terrified because we are so far away from the truth. 

SR: As an American citizen who happens to be empowered with knowledge about how weapons inspections work, how decisions are made regarding war, I am disillusioned beyond belief. 

This isn’t the first time we have been lied to by the president. But we have been lied to by military officers who are supposed to be above that. Three top Marine Corps officers stood before the American people and told bald-faced lies about what was going on. We have been lied to by Congress, who are supposed to be the people’s representatives who provide a check against executive overreach. And we have been lied to by the corporate media, a bunch of paid mouthpieces who repeat what the government tells them without question.

So Donald Trump can say there are chemical weapons in Syria, the generals parrot his words, the Congress nods its head dumbly, and the mass media repeats it over and over again to the American public. 

DB: Are you worried that we might end up in a shooting war with Russia at this point? 

SR: A week ago I was very worried. If I am going to give kudos to Jim Mattis it will be because he took the desire of Trump and Bolton to create a major crisis with Russia over the allegations of Syrian chemical weapons use and was able to water that down into putting on a show for the American people. We warned the Russians in advance, there were no casualties, we blew up three empty buildings. We spent a quarter of a billion dollars of taxpayer money and we got to pat ourselves on the back and tell everybody how great we are. But we avoided a needless confrontation with the Russians and I am a lot calmer today about the potential of a shooting war with Russia than I was a week ago.

The UK Government's Skripal Conspiracy Theory (Or How To Hold A Mass Of Contradictory Thoughts In Your Head). Rob Slane, via ZeroHedge. Apr. 29, 2018.

The Official Narrative on the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal is a collection of illogical claims and assertions that cannot be made to fit together, that make no rational sense, and which would require us to hold a mass of contradictory thoughts in our head if we were to accept it. It is in short a conspiracy theory, and a particularly bad one at that

As I have pointed out before, I am not attempting to counter this conspiracy theory with one of my own. I make no claims to know what happened in the Skripal incident. I am merely stating that the story that the UK Government and media have so far asked the public to believe cannot be true, since it is full of discrepancies and claims that are impossible to reconcile with the known facts. 

They are, of course, welcome at any time to show how those contradictions and improbable assertions can be reconciled, but until such time as they advance a compelling and coherent explanation, rational and objective observers shall just have to assume that these contradictions exist for a reason – namely that the official narrative of what happened in the Skripal case is not in fact what really happened in the Skripal case. 

So what exactly are those contradictory elements and improbable assertions in the Official Narrative, which place it firmly in the territory of a Very Bad Conspiracy Theory? There are many, but below are 10 of the most obvious...

Yemen War Great For US Jobs: Watch CNN's Wolf Blitzer Proclaim Civilian Deaths Are Worth It. ZeroHedge. Apr. 28, 2018.

With the still largely ignored Saudi slaughter in Yemen now in its fourth year, RT's In The Now has resurrected a forgotten clip from a 2016 CNN interview with Senator Rand Paul, which is currently going viral.

In a piece of cable news history that rivals Madeleine Albright's infamous words during a 1996 60 Minutes appearance where she calmly and coldly proclaimed of 500,000 dead Iraqi children that "the price is worth it," CNN's Wolf Blitzer railed against Senator Paul's opposition to a proposed $1.1 billion US arms sale to Saudi Arabia by arguing that slaughter of Yemeni civilians was worth it so long as it benefits US jobs and defense contractors.

At the time of the 2016 CNN interview, Saudi Arabia with the help of its regional and Western allies — notably the U.S. and Britain — had been bombing Yemen for a year-and-a-half, and as the United Nations noted, the Saudi coalition had been responsible for the majority of the war's (at that point) 10,000 mostly civilian deaths.

At that time the war was still in its early phases, but now multiple years into the Saudi-led bombing campaign which began in March 2015, the U.N. reports at least "5,000 children dead or hurt and 400,000 malnourished."

And now as the death toll tragically stands at many tens of thousands, and with a subsequent U.N. report from 2017 documenting in detail "the killing and maiming of children" on a mass scale, Blitzer's words are even more revealing of the role that CNN and other major American networks play in enabling and excusing U.S. and allied partners' war crimes abroad.

"No Attacks, No Victims": Syria Chemical Attack Video Participants Speak At OPCW Briefing. ZeroHedge. Apr. 27, 2018.

the West is happy to bomb a sovereign nation based on nothing more than non-public "evidence" suspected to have been staged and provided by the White Helmets, but when actual residents of Douma show up to tell their side of it, they are condemned as an "obscene masquerade" and denied an opportunity to submit their testimony on the record. Sounds about right for the military industrial complex which if nothing else scored a few extra billion in procurement contracts thanks to the latest farcical attack on Syria.

The Corruption and Deceit of the FBI. Publius Tacitus, Sic Semper Tyrannis. Apr. 24, 2018.

Efrem Zimbalist Jr., where are you? You are needed. If you are at least 60 years old I am sure you remember the TV series, the F.B.I., which featured Zimbalist as FBI Agent Lewis Erskine. That show did more to promote the image of the FBI has a straight up, honorable institution then any other PR stunt. It came at a time when news was surfacing that the FBI had spied on Martin Luther King and other Americans. But those real world events did little to tarnish the FBI reputation, which had been carefully stage managed and burnished by Hoover and his successors. 

Well, those days are over. We now have the spectacle of Jim Comey and Andy McCabe. Their escapades are exposing a highly politicized FBI that was easily seduced into punishing political enemies and shading investigations in favor of politicians that embraced the FBI leadership. No blind justice with these cats. Their eyes were firmly fixed on identifying whether the potential target of an investigation was friend or foe. If you were a friend, you got a pass. If you were the enemy then prison rape was in your future. 

The last two weeks have produced very important documentary evidence of the problems with Comey and McCabe. While those two were in cahoots in sand bagging a legitimate investigation of Hillary Clinton and fabricating one against Donald Trump, the expression karma is a bitch appears to be coming true for both.

Scarier Than John Bolton? Think of Nikki Haley for President! Philip Giraldi, Unz Review. Apr. 24, 2018.

The greater problem right now is that Nikki Haley is America’s face to the international community, even more than the Secretary of State. She has used her bully pulpit to do just that, i.e. bully, and she is ugly America personified, having apparently decided that something called American Exceptionalism gives her license to say and do whatever she wants at the United Nations. In her mind, the United States can do what it wants globally because it has a God-given right to do so, a viewpoint that doesn’t go down well with many countries that believe that they have a legal and moral right to be left alone and remain exempt from America’s all too frequent military interventions.

A Special Relationship Born in Hell. Philip Giraldi, South Front. Apr. 3, 2018.

If you want to understand what the “special relationship” between Israel and the United States really means consider the fact that Israeli Army snipers shot dead seventeen unarmed and largely peaceful Gazan demonstrators on Good Friday without a squeak coming out of the White House or State Department. Some of the protesters were shot in the back while running away, while another 1,000 Palestinians were wounded, an estimated 750 by gunfire, the remainder injured by rubber bullets and tear gas.  

The offense committed by the Gazan protesters that has earned them a death sentence was coming too close to the Israeli containment fence that has turned the Gaza strip into the world’s largest outdoor prison. President Donald Trump’s chief Middle East negotiator David Greenblatt described the protest as “a hostile march on the Israel-Gaza border…inciting violence against Israel.” And Nikki Haley at the U.N. has also used the U.S. veto to block any independent inquiry into the violence, demonstrating once again that the White House team is little more than Israel’s echo chamber. America’s enabling of the brutal reality that is today’s Israel makes it fully complicit in the war crimes carried out against the helpless and hapless Palestinian people.  

So where was the outrage in the American media about the massacre of civilians? Characteristically, Israel portrays itself as somehow a victim and the U.S. media, when it bothers to report about dead Palestinians at all, picks up on that line. The Jewish State is portrayed as always endangered and struggling to survive even though it is the nuclear armed regional superpower that is only threatened because of its own criminal behavior. And even when it commits what are indisputable war crimes like the use of lethal force against an unarmed civilian population, the Jewish Lobby and its media accomplices are quick to take up the victimhood refrain.

The Media War On Truthful Reporting And Legitimate Opinions - A Documentary. Moon of Alabama. Apr. 21, 2018.

Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’.
George Orwell, Looking back on the Spanish War, Chapter 4

Syria - Pentagon Hides Attack Failure - 70+ Cruise Missiles Shot Down. Moon of Alabama. Apr. 16, 2018.

Will America accept its defeat or will it challenge the Russian Bear and the Chinese Dragon? Elijah J. Magnier. - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. March 28, 2018.

The first part describes the current situation at the various fronts in Syria and the most likely next operations. The Syrian government is winning the conflict. U.S. CentCom General Votel admitted that the U.S. strategy in Syria has failed. Magnier concludes: 

The US has lost the « extremist battle »- they were incapable of achieving the “regime change” objective in Syria. That was the awakening of the Russian bear from its long hibernation who realised how the US was trying to corner it. Moscow also relied on the Chinese dragon, which shares Russia’s goals to eliminate all extremists and jihadist terrorists in Syria.  

Both Russia and China are now working closely to put an end to the uni-polar superpower and thus end US world dominance.

The second part looks at the development of U.S.-Russian relations over the last decade and the role U.S. 'regime change' policies in the eastern Europe and Middle East played in it. The U.S. attack on Syria was part of the wider challenging of Russia. It brought up a new coalition which is now countering U.S. moves: 

Obama saw the “Islamic State” growing in Iraq, moving to Syria, watched it occupying Iraq, allowed Jihadists to travel to the Middle East, opened all Saudi jails on condition jihadist extremists imprisoned are shipped to Syria. For one entire year, with “70 countries in a coalition fighting against ISIS” in Syria, the group was in fact expanding and increasing its wealth by selling increasing quantities of oil. All that to stop Iran and Russia, and create failed states (as in Libya) and fight Muslims with Muslims.  

But Moscow, Beijing and Tehran knew that Jihadists must be stopped in the Levant before they had the chance to move to their own countries.  

... 

Syria is not going to be another Libya and Russia and China agreed, along with Iran, to stop once and for all the US unilateral dominance at the gates of the Levant.

Part 3 takes an even wider view and describes how China, and the Russian-Chinese cooperation, succeeds in challenging U.S. unilateral domination of the globe: 

While the United States is selling for $110 billions weapons to Saudi Arabia to kill more Yemenis and threaten its neighbours (Qatar, Syria and Iran), Russia has signed 10 year contracts with China worth 600 billion dollars, and with Iran worth 400 billion dollars. Also, China has signed contracts with Iran worth 400 billion dollars. These contracts are aimed at economic cooperation, energy exchange; they promise an advanced economic future for these countries away from US dominance.  

The US believes it can corner Russia, China and Iran: Russia has a 7,000 kilometre border with China, Iran is not Iraq and Syria is not Afghanistan. In Syria, the destiny of that a world be ruled by unilateralism is over. The world is heading toward pluralism.

The question remains: Is Washington prepared to accept its defeat and acknowledge that it has lost control of the world and pull out of Syria?

Climate Links: April 2018

'We're doomed': Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will dare mention. Patrick Barkham, Guardian. Apr. 26, 2018.

We’re doomed,” says Mayer Hillman with such a beaming smile that it takes a moment for the words to sink in. “The outcome is death, and it’s the end of most life on the planet because we’re so dependent on the burning of fossil fuels. There are no means of reversing the process which is melting the polar ice caps. And very few appear to be prepared to say so.” 

Hillman, an 86-year-old social scientist and senior fellow emeritus of the Policy Studies Institute, does say so. His bleak forecast of the consequence of runaway climate change, he says without fanfare, is his “last will and testament”. His last intervention in public life. “I’m not going to write anymore because there’s nothing more that can be said,” he says when I first hear him speak to a stunned audience at the University of East Anglia late last year. 

From Malthus to the Millennium Bug, apocalyptic thinking has a poor track record. But when it issues from Hillman, it may be worth paying attention. Over nearly 60 years, his research has used factual data to challenge policymakers’ conventional wisdom. In 1972, he criticised out-of-town shopping centres more than 20 years before the government changed planning rules to stop their spread. In 1980, he recommended halting the closure of branch line railways – only now are some closed lines reopening. In 1984, he proposed energy ratings for houses – finally adopted as government policy in 2007. And, more than 40 years ago, he presciently challenged society’s pursuit of economic growth. 

... 

 “Even if the world went zero-carbon today that would not save us because we’ve gone past the point of no return.” 

... 

Without hope, goes the truism, we will give up. And yet optimism about the future is wishful thinking, says Hillman. He believes that accepting that our civilisation is doomed could make humanity rather like an individual who recognises he is terminally ill. Such people rarely go on a disastrous binge; instead, they do all they can to prolong their lives. 

Can civilisation prolong its life until the end of this century? “It depends on what we are prepared to do.” He fears it will be a long time before we take proportionate action to stop climatic calamity. “Standing in the way is capitalism. Can you imagine the global airline industry being dismantled when hundreds of new runways are being built right now all over the world? It’s almost as if we’re deliberately attempting to defy nature. We’re doing the reverse of what we should be doing, with everybody’s silent acquiescence, and nobody’s batting an eyelid.”

Its time to think seriously about cutting off the supply of fossil fuels. David Roberts, Vox. Apr. 29, 2018.

There is a bias in climate policy shared by analysts, politicians, and pundits across the political spectrum so common it is rarely remarked upon. To put it bluntly: Nobody, at least nobody in power, wants to restrict the supply of fossil fuels.

Policies that choke off fossil fuels at their origin — shutting down mines and wells; banning new ones; opting against new pipelines, refineries, and export terminals — have been embraced by climate activists, picking up steam with the Keystone pipeline protestsand the recent direct action of the Valve Turners. 

But they are looked upon with some disdain by the climate intelligentsia, who are united in their belief that such strategies are economically suboptimal and politically counterproductive. 

Now a pair of economists has offered a cogent argument that the activists are onto something — that restrictive supply-side (RSS) climate policies have unique economic and political benefits and deserve a place alongside carbon prices and renewable energy supports in the climate policy toolkit.

If Solar And Wind Are So Cheap, Why Are They Making Electricity So Expensive? Michael Shellenberger, Forbes. Apr. 23, 2018.

Over the last year, the media have published story after story after story about the declining price of solar panels and wind turbines. 

People who read these stories are understandably left with the impression that the more solar and wind energy we produce, the lower electricity prices will become.  

And yet that’s not what’s happening. In fact, it’s the opposite. 

Between 2009 and 2017, the price of solar panels per watt declined by 75 percent while the price of wind turbines per watt declined by 50 percent.  

And yet — during the same period — the price of electricity in places that deployed significant quantities of renewables increased dramatically.

Underwater melting of Antarctic ice far greater than thought, study finds. Jonathan Watts, Guardian. Apr. 2, 2018.




Crop insecurity: what is the future of our food? Sayed Azam-Ali, FT.com. Apr. 6, 2018.

The scale of the challenge is formidable. A rising global population coupled with a warming planet will lead to increasingly scarce water and energy resources — what Sir John Beddington, formerly the UK’s chief scientific adviser, has called a “perfect storm”. Demand for food and animal feed is set to at least double by 2050. Rural populations are moving to cities and arable land is being degraded. As our climate changes, green revolution technologies will become riskier, costlier and more demanding on the planet. We will need not one but several solutions to transform agriculture so that it nourishes us without diminishing the natural resources on which we all depend. 

... 

In his Nobel Peace Prize speech “Peace and Humanity”, Borlaug described the green revolution as: “A temporary success in man’s war against hunger and deprivation; it has given man a breathing space.” Fifty years later, this space is running out.

The Dangerous Belief That Extreme Technology Will Fix Climate Change. Aleszu Bajak, HuffPo. Apr. 27, 2018.

It’s no surprise that geoengineering is such an easy sell. Relying on a technological fix that’s just over the horizon avoids the mountain moving required to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, bring hundreds of countries into agreement on how to limit and clean up emissions, and alter the consumption habits of an entire civilization. Those are systemic complexities ingrained in our economies and cultures. Propping up glaciers to limit sea level rise, sprinkling iron dust into the oceans to encourage plankton growth to absorb carbon, or spraying the skies to reflect the sun’s heat just seems simpler. And, as Wake Smith shows, increasingly feasible. 

But the problem with the way geoengineering is discussed today, lamented John Ehrenfeld, former director of the MIT Program on Technology, Business, and Environment, is that it doesn’t address the societal issues that got us in this mess in the first place.

“It’s a failure to accept complexity of the system, and the system includes people,” Ehrenfeld told me recently over coffee. For decades, Ehrenfeld, who is now retired, researched and promoted the concept of sustainability. But to Ehrenfeld, after all the climate conferences, all the stakeholder roundtables, all the debates on market-driven solutions, the questions and answers being debated never questioned capitalism, civilization, and the notion of progress. 

Tackling a problem as deeply ingrained as global warming, Ehrenfeld said, will require humanity to face an existential question that geoengineering alone cannot address: Are we willing to sacrifice growth to ensure the survival of our species? 

“Absent decoupling growth from progress,” Ehrenfeld said, “we won’t address the core of the problem.”

The African Anthropocene. Gabrielle Hecht, Aeon.





Estimated US Energy Consumption in 2017. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

REVOLUTION IN A WARMING WORLD. Andreas Malm, Climate & Capitalism, March 17, 2018.

Lessons from the Russian to the Syrian Revolutions

... 

Here, then, can be discerned the contours of a third hypothetical configuration: revolution to treat the symptoms of global warming. The Syrian and Egyptian cases are no outliers. Surveys have found that the day-to-day processes of capital accumulation — enclosures, commodification, planning for real estate, centralization of resources — heavily distort most adaptation projects around the world, leaving precisely the most vulnerable people without cushions.[53] But ‘in revolutionary times the limits of what is possible expand a thousandfold,’ recalling Lenin.[54] If social relations block the way to effective pro-poor adaptation, they ought to be overhauled. Here is one more reason to seize every opportunity catastrophes open up. Unlike the two previous configurations, this one would presuppose revolutionaries who consciously act against the impacts of climate change on the terrain over which they can wield influence. But that influence will by nature be constrained. 

Revolution Against the Causes 

Adaptation to three, four, not to speak of eight degrees is bound to be a futile endeavour. No matter how advanced the sprinklers Syrian farmers install, irrigation requires water. No walls can save the Nile Delta from the underground infiltration of the sea. No one can perform any kind of physical labour when temperatures settle above a certain level, and so on. But the proven fossil fuel reserves can be kept in the ground. Emissions can be slashed to zero. ‘Everybody says this. Everybody admits this. Everybody has decided it is so. Yet nothing is being done,’ and this is the rationale for the most exigent type of revolution, the one that, in full consciousness of the roots of the problem, wages a full-scale onslaught on fossil capital, just as the Bolsheviks set themselves the task of putting ‘an immediate end to the war,’ insisting that ‘it is clear to everybody that in order to end this war, which is closely bound up with the present capitalist system, capital itself must be fought.’[55] This is the moment to read the Lenin of 1917 anew and salvage the kernel of the Bolshevik project: 

“We can draw, perhaps, the most striking comparison of all between reactionary-bureaucratic methods of combating a catastrophe, which are confined to minimum reforms, and revolutionary-democratic methods, which, to justify their name, must directly aim at a violent rupture with the old, obsolete system and at the achievement of the speediest possible progress …”[56] 

— speed here being the critical dimension. The dawdling bourgeoisie, meanwhile, ‘as always, are guided by the rule: “Après nous le deluge.”’[57] Policies that would save millions or even billions of lives could be put in place, if only the obstructing interests were removed. ‘The ways of combating catastrophe and famine are available, the measures required to combat them are quite clear, simple, perfectly feasible, and fully within reach of the people’s forces.’ We could begin by updating the Communist Manifesto and list ten:[58]

• Enforce a complete moratorium on all new facilities for extracting coal, oil or natural gas.
• Close down all power-plants running on such fuels.
• Draw 100 per cent of electricity from non-fossil sources, primarily wind and solar.
• Terminate the expansion of air, sea and road travel; convert road and sea travel to electricity and wind; ration remaining air travel to ensure a fair distribution until it can be completely replaced with other means of transport.
• Expand mass transit systems on all scales, from subways to intercontinental high-speed trains.
• Limit the shipping and flying of food and systematically promote local supplies.
• End the burning of tropical forests and initiate massive programmes for reforestation.
• Refurbish old buildings with insulation and require all new ones to generate their own zero-carbon power.
• Dismantle the meat industry and move human protein requirements towards vegetable sources.
• Pour public investment into the development and diffusion of the most efficient and sustainable renewable energy technologies, as well as technologies for carbon dioxide removal.[59] 

That would be a start — nothing more — yet it would probably amount to a revolution, not only in the forces of production but also in the social relations in which they are so deeply enmeshed. Just how thoroughly the phenomenon of CO2 emissions is bound up with class society has recently been highlighted by two striking reports. One tenth of the human species accounts for half of all present emissions from consumption, half of the species for one tenth. The richest 1 per cent have a carbon footprint some 175 times that of the poorest 10 per cent; the emissions of the richest 1 per cent of Americans, Luxembourgians and Saudi Arabians are two thousand times larger than those of the poorest Hondurans, Mozambicans or Rwandans. Shares of the CO2 accumulated since 1820 are similarly skewed.[60] Some ecological class hatred is certainly warranted, and then we have not even mentioned the hard inner core of fossil capital, the Rex Tillersons of this world, the billionaires who swim in money from pulling fossil fuels out of the ground and selling the fuel for the fires

Distressed more than depressed

A Metaphor for the Planet. Jack Downey, The Baffler. Apr. 19, 2018.

Less than a week shy of the eighth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, which saw some 210 million gallons of oil hemorrhage into the Gulf of Mexico, the storied civil rights attorney and environmentalist David Buckel doused himself in gasoline and set himself ablaze in the early morning hours of Saturday, April 14, on the Lenape ancestral land we know as Brooklyn.

As far as we know, he died alone, but in a place where he was sure to be found—where the charred remains of his corpse would be stumbled upon by strangers out for an early morning jog, or dog-walk. Buckel also prepared for his autocremation with exceptional care: he left at least three separate messages explaining his self-immolation as performative speech that both dramatized the globally suicidal ravages of ecological destruction and called upon the rest of us to take meaningful evasive action. And as someone who was a member of the most ecologically destructive class of creatures in the history of the planet (contemporary affluent industrialized Americans), he sought to leverage his privilege in solidarity with those frontline communities already in the midst of environmental collapse.

Buckel’s spouse, Terry Kaelber, remembers Buckel as “[d]istressed more than depressed” in his last days. Friends and colleagues have remembered him to the media as brilliant, warm, and passionate—someone whose heroic professional portfolio was matched by his love for individuals and generosity of spirit. The opposite of nihilistic.

Unlike Buckel’s, the majority of self-immolations barely make the news: John Constantino on the Mall of America during the government shutdown of 2013; or the Reverend Charles Moore, who autocremated in a strip mall parking lot in east Texas as a call for racial justice; the sum total of 160 (confirmed) Tibetan self-immolations that have occurred since 2009, which Buckel invoked in one of his letters: “This is not new, as many have chosen to give a life based on the view that no other action can most meaningfully address the harm they see. Here is a hope that giving a life might bring some attention to the need for expanded actions, and help others give a voice to our home, and Earth is heard.” Buckel’s methodical preparation included an awareness that he was stepping into a lineage of protest that has spanned decades since its iconic introductory deployment in 1963 by the Vietnamese monk Thich Quang Duc in Saigon—captured in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo by Malcolm Browne, but probably most well-known to GenXers as the cover art for Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled debut album (1992).

For all the evidence that David Buckel was inspired by a sober desperation borne of the widely acknowledged dire prognosis for our world, absent radical change, there are those who seem determined to pathologize his actions. Dr. Ann P. Haas and Andrew W. Lane, both credentialed suicide prevention workers, penned an objection to the New York Times for its attempts to understand Buckel’s self-immolation as anything more than “just” suicide: “People do not die by suicide out of concern over fossil fuels, or any other public policy issue.” In their presumably earnest desire to prevent future “copycats,” Haas and Lane literally demand that we subordinate Buckel’s agency, figuring him as ontologically alien. And while this response might seem like a grotesque violation of Buckel’s memory—the exact opposite of his clear intent—there is a way in which Haas and Lane’s op-ed invites us to reflect about whether the form of self-immolation protest renders the content of the message unintelligible.

Self-immolation is affectively repulsive to contemplate. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that no major environmental organization has even publicly acknowledged his existence in the week since he died. Like Buckel’s death, their inaction is also communicative: he is not of them. His memory is dangerous to their more moderate calls for legislative gradualism and personal lifestyle change—arenas in which Buckel also excelled as a composting obsessive in his later years.

We do not have access to David Buckel’s interior life, which, it should be acknowledged, may have been as opaque to him as our own often are to ourselves. But we do know how he wanted his final act to be recollected: as a clarion call to attend to the reality that ecological apocalypse is already manifest, and that business as usual—environmentalism as usual—is killing us.

5-year anniversary of another false flag

updated October 2021:

The Boston Marathon Bombing 8.5 Years Later. Paul Craig Roberts. 

original post:

Crisis actors? Some suspicious photos from the Boston Marathon Bombing in 2013.


When I found out that a colleague, like me, doesn't believe the official story about 9/11, and, what's more, is dubious about the moon landings, I sent him a link to this website for his amusement:
Center for an Informed America

I also shared the following 2 pictures with him, to see if he had any suspicions about Boston (or Sandy Hook or San Bernardino or Charlie Hebdo or the Paris truck incident, etc.)

And my colleague said "Wow", and asked if that guy with the blown-off leg(s) is real or fake.

You can’t believe every crackpot’s claims about crisis actors, but I absolutely believe they are used in false flag events.

So, to his question:

Well, the media, obviously, portrayed him and his injury as real/legit, such as here, at the NY Post, and here, at the Boston Herald, and here, 1:10 into the video here at CBS.

But:

Do you think you would be conscious… and not dripping any blood along the road… if your leg looked like that?

And if your leg looked like that, do you think that’s how any EMS personnel would actually move you? (even if there was a shortage of stretchers)


Here they are “setting up”, and he, on the right, is not just sitting up or propped up un-aided, but he's totally un-attended;

EMS musta said:
“his wounds don’t look too bad.. obviously he can wait, he won’t bleed out… let’s tend to these others first”

Another pic of them setting up… though you can’t see him in the lowest pic below, you can see the lady in black and red from the pic above (bottom right) in the pic below (middle-left).. and note the guy leaning on his elbow:

Below, same staged scene, but now the black lady in white shirt and red sweater(?) from above isn’t there… but the red-head with the red sleeves is still in the same pose, though some of the stuff around her is different

Plus, the blood looks pretty fake in many of the pics

And, seriously, I see lots of blood, but where did the rest of his legs go? Evaporated?

His legs totally disintegrated into thin air, but the guy right beside him has a scratch on his thigh?

And, once again, why is the guy behind legless guy getting attention but legless guy is lying there all alone?

And, wait.. who is the guy behind legless guy?  the guy behind legless guy, the guy with a scratch on his leg who is getting attention rather than legless guy... he's none other than the guy who was casually leaning on his elbow in the previous pic above, and, prior to that, was apparently helping to pose legless guy, seemingly along with help of the lady in the white shirt and red coat... while first making sure his hoodie was up and his sunglasses on

Back to the links to mainstream media above:
Note that none of CBS/Post/Herald show the unreal/unrealistic full shot including the view of the whole shredded leg, plus the blood-free asphalt ... presumably because it was too clearly too phony, so they used cropped versions, to keep it more authentic looking


So, whether he is real or fake?

I found the suggestion somewhere that “Jeff Bauman”, as he is referred to in the media, is actually Nick Vogt, who lost his legs in Kandahar .. but what do I know? I’m just a crackpot conspiracy theorist

If he was a crisis actor, and it sure looks that way, he surely wasn't alone. Based on the pics above, it looks like they had quite the cast.

Here's another one; does this look real?




Look at the blood on her feet… but no blood on the one shoe she is wearing, no tears or rips or blood on her pants… good thing that loosely-tied bandana is keeping her from losing any more blood from her unapparent leg wound



A much more detailed account of all this B.S. can be found here:

SPECIAL REPORT ON THE BOSTON MARATHON BOMBINGS: PART I. Dave McGowan. May 7, 2013.

with a few choice snippets:

The next image up for review is of Nicole, with her twice-broken left leg, fractured ankle and severed Achilles tendon. Luckily, those injuries haven’t hindered her mobility as she has clearly moved from her original position. Those are some excruciatingly painful injuries that she has, but she seems to be toughing it out okay. She has though been abandoned by her husband, who you would think would be tending to and comforting her, and her legless sister is nowhere to be seen. Her right arm got peppered with shrapnel, but luckily for her it was a special kind of shrapnel that shreds clothing fibers but doesn’t penetrate flesh. That was a relatively common phenomenon in Boston that day, with the guy in the following image, looking like he just walked off a film set, being a classic example.

and from Part II:

Moving on now to the next image in the sequence of events, we find Arredondo moving quickly to aid Bauman. Just kidding … what we actually find him doing is beginning to pull the fence down from the inside, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he is bringing it down directly on top of one of the victims, which is probably okay because she was undoubtedly an actress anyway. What is important to note here is that the Cowboy Hero already had access to the victims but rather than assist them he chose to spend the next few minutes helping to tear the fence down, pretending as though he hadn’t already been on the other side of it. No medical personnel are yet on the scene and yet almost all of the victims have already left on their own, thoughtfully carting their severed limbs off with them. [Legless] Jeff, naturally enough, continues to be ignored. As can be seen, the bomb shrapnel all passed cleanly between the fence pickets without breaking a single one.

So, do you really think the Tsarnaev brothers did it? 

Or were they just the patsies for these guys?

As per Paul Craig Roberts:

“As I reported at the time, and as all evidence indicates, the alleged Boston Marathon Bombing was a publicly announced drill in which crisis actors were used. There were no real deaths or injuries, and the Tsarnaev brothers did not set off a bomb. 

The drill was turned into a real event by propagandists who used the propaganda to advance their agenda of police state regulation and to test US reaction to the use of martial law to close down the city of Boston and the airport and to use 10,000 armed troops to invade without warrants and search citizens’ homes under the guise that a dangerous 19-year old “terrorist,” who was already shot up by soldiers or police, was on the loose. 

The insouciant American public, the law schools, bar associations, US Congress and media accepted this extraordinary violation of the US Constitution based on the most flimsy of all possible stories, thus opening Pandora’s Box of police state measures by the US government. 

The faked terrorist event required terrorists, and the Tsarnaev brothers were selected for that patsy role. The older brother was murdered by police. The younger brother, having unexpectedly survived police attempts to shoot him to death, was put on trial. His attorneys were appointed by the government, and the attorneys, rather than the prosecutor, convicted their assigned client.”

Unlike PCR, I do think there were actual bombs that went off and that there were legit injuries; there would have been too many witnesses at the Marathon to just totally fake it out of thin air; so, like 9/11, they had to sacrifice some real people… but they used their dramaticized version of events, complete with crisis actors, to ramp up the blood and gore of it all.

The world is fucked up, man.

You can't believe anything in the mainstream media.

Its all Orwell all the time.

amazing timing - Ian Welsh puts pen to paper on exactly what I've been thinking this morning

having a bad day to start the week, continuing a deterioration of my mental health

and reading the wishful thinking aspects of Paul Gilding's The Great Disruption wasn't helping

because I think we're royally screwed, we just don't all recognize it yet

but he did recognize it...  he just couldn't handle the despair he was feeling about it so started to believe in fairy tales... like the world will come to its senses and completely re-invent everything before its too late for the ecosystems we depend on.... fairy tales

we are absolutely fucked; its not if but when; and we've got no clue (at least the vast majority of us)

because we as a species suck at those types of determinations

fuck, we suck at critical thinking in general

how else can one explain:

• Tulip mania or TSLA or Bitcoin; AAA-rated CDO-squared and NINJA loans; NASDAQ from 1500 to 5000 to 1500 all in 3 years; 
• Christianity is correct; no, Islam is; no, Judaism is; no, Buddhism is; no, Hinduism; no, Zoroastrianism; no, Mormonism; no, Jainism; no, Shinto; no, Scientology; no..... (never mind Zeus or Odin or Ra or Quetzalcoatl or ...)
• 2 planes caused 3 towers to come crashing down.. and everyone has collective memory loss about the 3rd one
• Osama Bin Laden was given burial at sea.. not brought back to the US... and, no: no videos, no photos
• infinite growth on a finite planet

so, given my mood and my current state of mind, it was pretty great timing to read Ian Welsh's post this morning:

Making Sure YOU Stay Alive When Millions Are Dying. Ian Welsh. April 2, 2018.

Ok my friends, it’s time to talk seriously.

We are screwed, blued and tatooed. We are so fucked that we can’t see straight.

The vast majority of people are in complete denial about the level of pain coming down the pike.

The combination of climate change and ecological collapse is going to hit us like high speed train carrying nitroglycerine derailing in the middle of a oil refinery.

The timing on this shit is unclear. I have seen coherently-argued cases that ecological collapse could happen soon. Heck, I’ve seen cases that say it, er, should have happened by now.

But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. And combined with climate change and the way we have utterly fucked up our management of fresh water, this is going to lead to, in a reasonable best case scenario, hundreds of millions of deaths, and a billion or so refugees. [That's best case, remember]

The aquifers are being depleted in wide areas in China, India, America and elsewhere. The groundwater is also being polluted.

No one is prepared and no one is doing sweet fuck all. I get chewed on for being “cynical”, but people who do so are absolute fools and morons: anyone who cheered the Paris accords on the environment was delusional at best. They had no enforcement provisions. Virtually no one was going to meet those goals AND the goals were insufficient to being with.

We were told they weren’t going to do enough, and weren’t going to hold themselves to it anyway, and people pretended to believe this BS was going to make the least bit of difference?

Grow the fuck up.

Now, if you are not old or the sort of sick that means your lifespan is shit and your odds [of] surviving major catastrophe are crap, or if you care about your children or some other people, you need to start taking this into account in your personal lives.

We are BEYOND STOPPING THIS.

It is too late. Too late.

Tattoo that into your brain.

Even if our governments suddenly were run by people who cared [instead of sociopaths and megalomaniacs], it would be too late to do anything but prepare and try and reduce how bad it will be.

But they aren’t, and they aren’t going to be soon enough. Heck, soon enough was about 10 years ago, and that was optimistic to any sane person. By 2008 I was thinking “yeah, we’re fucked, but maybe, just maybe, if we act now.”

Frankly, I was delusional. Hope’ll do that to you. Horrible drug. Obviously our leaders are psyhopathic douchebags with the planning ability of mythical lemmings (the real animals are not as stupid as the legend), and obviously most voters don’t take the issue seriously, and obviously nothing was going to be done no matter who was elected.

But, y’know, “hope.”

Alright, hope’s over. It died for me by February of 2009, on a bunch of fronts.

High speed freight train, carrying nitro. Derailing. In the middle of your life.

I don’t know when this stuff will really hit. Probably someone has made the prediction that is right.

But I do know it will hit. I know it will cause major wars between major states. I know it will cause waves of refugees in the millions. I know it will cause vast numbers of deaths.

This is obvious.

So take it into account in your planning of your life. I’m not talking politics in this post: that ship is done. Do what you can at the political level if you want, but I’m talking your personal survival and that of people you care about.

If you live in the most vulnerable countries and areas (for example India will be absolutely creamed), take that into account. But also take into account we have a very fragile, just in time delivery system.

Are you on drugs? I mean that literally. Legal psychoactive drugs, or legal life saving drugs. The US had a major shortage of blood bags due to Puerto Rico getting hit by a hurricane because, hey, they were made there.

We have intensely locally concentrated production of materials that are then sent to entire continents and countries thru fragile supply chains that end in warehouses that do not hold large stocks, because everything is “lean and mean” and “just-in-time”. Shocks hit a system like that, and there will be shortages. Medicine, food, fuel and plenty of other stuff.

So start building in some ability to survive if you care about surviving.

And don’t allow yourself to go all delusional thinking it won’t happen. Best you can hope for is you die before it does. Good bet for some of us. But if you’re young and healthy, or care about people who are, no.