#all planned by the deep state’s oligarchs
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“THE BRUTAL INVASION ON IRACK… I MEAN, ON UKRAINE” 👿BUSH 👿SENIOR SAIS … THESE PEOPLE ARE 👿👿👿
#the invasion of Irak#the invasion of Ukraine#all planned by the deep state’s oligarchs#demons rule#wake up humanity#wake up america#these people are evil#pure evil#do you want to be free#do you want to enjoy life#what do you want : wealth health love respect joy peace#fight for it#stand up#speak truth#standup#never be silent#thé deep state’s oligarchs are committing crimes against humanity right before your eyes in your backyard#are going to let them take over the world#are you going to let them inoculate you your children every six months with dangerous substances#the time to fight for justice freedom harmony and peace is NOW#thé deep state puppets fight teeth and nails to defend their freedom their wealth their rights to do as they please including killing you#are awakened yet#what it will take for you humanity to understand that we are in a digital emotional physical and psychological world war III#doing nothing is no longer an option#the only way for humans to end the misery violence drugs poverty diseases child abuse child/human trafficking child/human/animal sacrifices#is to fight back stay united strong and never give up#you matter#your child’s lives matter#fight for justice#speaktruth
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I hope this isn't being to personal for living people area, I'm not asking for a deep dive into her life or anything. If you're a fan of Superman(who isn't besides supervillains, right?) you're going to be familiar with Lois Lane's work. Well, I was looking at some stuff about the All-Star Squadron and noticed the name of one of the lesser known Squad members, The Jester real name Chuck Lane. Are they at all related? It'd be so cool if the woman who helped introduce the world to superheroes had a mystery man in her family history
Not only am I a superhero historian, I also went to college in Metropolis and still get the Daily Planet delivered. I know who Lois Lane is. She's not the kind of public figure one is capable of ignoring once aware of her and her contributions not only within the field of public liaison for the first and greatest hero of his generation but in general as a seeker of truth and a gadfly in the halls of power speak for themselves.
Chuck Lane AKA The Jester was a mystery man of a more obscure kind, though he had connections to the Freedom Fighters sub group within the All Star Squadron, having worked with them before the war.
(A newspaper photo of the Jester breaking up a fascist attempt to rob a benefit for war orphans within the British Empire)
As for your theory that their shared Lane name might give them some kind of relationship. I'm going to say no for the pure fact that Chuck Lane's personal life is a 15 car pile up of batshit that I would love to share with you now.
The Lane family of Chuck's birth were rather affluent Northeast WASP types, their point of pride being their claim to descent from Walter DeLane, supposed the court jester of King Arthur (Arthurian scholars, both literary and historical, cannot agree on a single thing ABOUT DeLane so I am leaving that serpent where I found it unless someone forces me otherwise)
Revealing this to Chuck upon his graduation from police academy, they also revealed the bigger bombshell. That they were members of a secret society known as The Arcadians, who had attempted to "guide" America into the role of global superpower since the Revolutionary Age. Including pushing American into intervention in WWII to accelerate its discovery of the atomic bomb.
After the war, Chuck rose to a position of authority within the Arcadians but often clashes with its antidemocratic ideals. It wasn't until the death of Chuck's son and daughter in law by Arcadian decree that Chuck turned against them totally, raising his orphaned grandson to take on his role as The Jester.
(Charles Lane II upon attacking an Arcadian ball and holding the crowd at gunpoint)
While they DID succeed in bringing down the Arcadians in a suicide attack that cost the elder Lane his life, it seems Lane II had made plans beyond those of his grandfather, attempting the use of mystical artifacts to absorb and co-opt the power of Uncle Sam to grant himself dominion of the United States. In a battle that cost the life of Andre Twist, the fourth Firebrand, he was defeated and taken into custody where he was eventually sentenced to death by a jury of his peers.
All of this foolishness (no pun intended) leaves the Jester Lanes with more than a bit of a mixed legacy. While the elder Lane did indeed fight against fascists and villains in his day, and eventually give his life to stop the Arcadians. His tacit capitulation to their oligarchic ideals after the war for years, only to become personally invested in destroying them after the death of his son calls his motivations into question and his desire for revenge and failure to fully reject the Arcadian worldview turned his grandson into a reactionary monster.
#dc#dcu#dc comics#dc universe#superhero#comics#tw unreality#unreality#unreality blog#ask game#ask blog#asks open#please interact#worldbuilding#jester#chuck lane#charles lane
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ONE LAST DANCE WITH THE EAGLE
Rodrigo Roa Duterte is not just a former President of the Republic of the Philippines. He is the most beloved president by the Filipino people ever. The man is a living legend. His accomplishment is beyond description. He showed the world that Filipinos can be great leaders in their own unique way and more. Former President Duterte have shattered the myth that Philippines is beyond redemption. That if we elect a leader who truly loves his country, nothing is impossible.
On the other hand, Rodrigo Roa Duterte is the worst enemy one can find. He is most feared by corrupts and criminals alike. He shook the knees of oligarchs, the media, the lefts and the Catholic church. Rodrigo Duterte is the ultimate description of what a fearless leader should look like. Even the Deep State is wary of him.
From 2016 to 2022, Duterte exceeded beyond expectations of what a great leader can accomplish in 6 short years. The only mistake he made is to let a dead Dictator get a piece of land inside the Libingan ng mga Bayani that gave the greedy family a second chance in life and politics. The rest is history.
As we speak, Rodrigo Roa Duterte is being bullied, ganged-up and hunted by rabid dogs under the payroll of his enemies. At the age of 79, Duterte was supposed to rest and enjoy his retirement. But here he comes spending his last drop of energy fighting off Dogs and clowns determined to destroy him and his country. He is basically fighting all alone.
The Senate and The House of Representatives is now assuming the rule of the hound dogs. They are tasks to destroy the Dutertes in the hope that they no longer exist by 2028. The Duterte brand is the only threat to corruption, oligarchy and the plan of the Deep State to turn Philippines into a narco state and make it their proxy for US-China war.
The Filipinos saw the hearing in the Senate with Duterte in October 28 and in House of Representative last night, November 13. Duterte single-handedly faced the bullies and the pretenders making them look like toothless dogs and useless clowns. Dozens of them plotting and working together like hungry hyenas surrounding a lone old lion. And they could not crack the old man after hours of questioning and wearing him down like wannabe star prosecutors.
All the hearings in the Senate and HOR may look funny and entertaining. But the old man is showing every Filipino that if only we follow him to be upright, fearless and keeps on doing things for the good of his country, no greedy Senator or Congressman can put Duterte or anybody down.
After hours of verbal and legal skirmish in the Senate and HOR, the old man remained standing. The rabid dogs and clowns could not touch Duterte or even cite him in contempt. Simply because the know Duterte is on the side of the truth and the Filipino people are watching praying the Senate and HOR will make one false move to trigger a People's revolution.
Now what?
We all continue with our lives. Because many of Filipinos treat the Duterte investigation like a movie and some sort of entertainment.
Our 79 year old champion have once again showed the Filipinos that all we need to make this country great is for each of us to love his country unconditionally. All we need is to follow him.
How many fights does Duterte needs to risks until we Filipinos realize that we all need to stand up now?
Most of us are very good in praising and glorifying dead heroes. Yet here we are, refusing to march and fight side-by-side with the greatest Filipino Living hero named Rodrigo Roa Duterte.
When will we unite and move forward? When Duterte himself is dead and begging a piece of land to be properly buried?
One day, our grandchildren will ask us "Grandpa, did you fight along side Rodrigo Duterte?" Your answer will be as good as mine.
We have failed Rodrigo Roa Duterte many times. He is very weak and his days are numbered. But the old man is not giving up on us. Not yet.
Will he show up for another big fight just to give us the chance to fight along side with him? If yes, will we just watch and let him die of frustration in the hands of heartless greedy enemies as they bully and wear down the old man with contempt and ridicule?
We do not deserve you Rodrigo Roa Duterte!
(Note: This article is getting viral with 18k shares as of 10pm. This might get flagged or taken down. Please copy paste before they delete this post)
https://buymeacoffee.com/junabinesb
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Is US Alarmism Over China's 'Grab' of American Farmland Justified?
— Sputnik International | Monday June 3, 2024
In this Sept. 22, 2015 photo, a central Illinois farmer races against the sunset to harvest his cornfield field near Farmingdale, Ill. With most of this year's corn and soybeans harvested, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is boosting its expectations for the size of the crops. Sputnik International. © AP Photo/ Seth Perlman
US Lawmakers Claim China is on a Buying Spree of American Farmland even though private investors and firms from the People's Republic are nowhere near the club of top five foreign owners of the country's land.
The US House of Representatives Committee on Agriculture passed the Farm, Food and National Security Act of 2024 (Farm Bill) 33-21 on May 24. Explaining why the move is a "big win" for the US, Congresswoman Ashley Hinson told the Daily Mail that the proposed legislation would help prevent "Communist China" from grabbing American land.
"Communist China shouldn't be allowed to buy another acre of American farmland, nor should we rely upon our top foreign adversary for key parts of our food supply chain," Hinson told the media outlet.
In reality, Chinese private investors and firms possessed less than 1 percent (or 349,442 acres) of all foreign-held agricultural land in the US as of December 31, 2022, according to the Farm Service Agency of the United States Department of Agriculture.
The Chinese possessions are spread across the US, including in Texas (162,167 acres); North Carolina (44,776 acres); Missouri (43,071 acres); Utah (32,447 acres); and Virginia (14,382 acres).
For comparison's sake, Canadian investors own 14.2 million acres or 32 percent of all foreign-owned US land, ranking top of the list. Thirteen million acres are held by Dutch investors (12 percent), while Italians (6 percent), Brits (6 percent), and Germans (5 percent) follow. The remaining 17.1 million acres are held by various smaller international landowners, including China.
All in all, foreign investors held a stake in over 43.4 million acres or around 3.1 percent of all US agricultural land.
There is nothing particularly new about acquiring foreign farmland. American investors routinely buy land and real estate abroad, for example. US and European companies are planning to acquire Ukrainian arable lands once hostilities are over, given that the moratorium on the sale of agricultural land in the country was lifted on July 1, 2021.
The act was passed in March 2020 and stipulated that in 2022 only natural persons would be authorized to buy land. However, starting from July 2023, corporate entities would also be allowed to buy up to 10,000 ha (24,710 acres) of land each, while foreigners would be granted the right to buy Ukrainian land only after a referendum concerning the issue.
Remarkably, the Oakland Institute – a California-based progressive think tank – revealed on February 21, 2023, that over 28 percent of Ukraine’s arable land is already in the possession of European and North American entities or Ukrainian oligarchs. The report was fiercely criticized by the Western mainstream press.
However, in April this year, Polish President Andrzej Duda appeared to confirm the think tank's findings by telling the Lithuanian press that "industrial agriculture (…) is not really run by Ukrainians; it is run by big companies from Western Europe, from the USA. If we look today at the owners of most of the land, they are not Ukrainian companies."
The trend appears to be deep-rooted. In July 2009, Der Spiegel shed light on "modern colonialism" exercised by big American and European investors who massively bought up cheap land in crisis-ridden countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
'Espionage' Accusations
While some US lawmakers and think tanks admit that China's land holdings in the US are quite modest, they accuse the Chinese of using their land to spy on the US military on behalf of Beijing. No evidence has been provided to back up the allegations, however.
The only case circulated by the Western media concerns China-based food producer, Fufeng Group, which acquired 300 acres of land 16 miles away from the Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota. No proof of Fufeng Group's apparent "espionage" has been presented so far.
The Heritage Foundation, a US conservative think tank, even went so far as to claim that any Chinese real estate purchases or mere leases deserve suspicion.
"Chinese ownership of any real estate may be a concern if it is near critical infrastructure, whether or not it is agricultural land," claimed the think tank. "Adding further complexity, national security concerns may be present even in non-ownership interests in real estate – for example, if a Chinese tech company leases office space across the street from the Pentagon or acquires an easement to build wind turbines near a military base."
US lawmakers and think tanks' fight against "Communist China" resembles nothing so much as a McCarthy-style crusade over a "Red Scare". The ongoing speculations about China's "land grab" coincided with the overall deterioration of US-Chinese relations. Team Biden is raising stakes in the ongoing trade war against China and is continuing to militarize the island of Taiwan and the Philippines to preserve Washington's waning hegemony in the Asia Pacific.
#Sputnik International#China ���🇳#United States 🇺🇸#US Alarmism#Grabbing | American Farmlands#Crying Babies | US Lawmakers#Ekaterina Blinova#Andrzej Duda | Joe Biden | Texas | Europe#Land | Farmer | Agriculture | Espionage
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There is no "deep state." There are just government workers doing the jobs we Americans ASKED them to do like: make sure your water is safe, make sure your air is clean, make sure you get your Social Security check or your doctor paid by Medicare.
Do you really want those people fired?
Ironically, Trump and the Heritage Foundation wrote plans for an ACTUAL "deep state" of fools who will NOT enforce our pesky laws that inconvenience the rich.
Project 2025 is a written plan AND a job application database for MAGA fools to sign up to take government jobs from competent people which will be assigned to idiots who will just do whatever they're told.
For example: They'd make a call and say, "Trump says to stop sending Social Security checks!"
New Project 2025 Social Security employees: "Okay, whatever Trump wants!" And they'd just ... do it!
No one should be okay with that.
It's corrupt. It hurts Americans. Hiring an army of mindless zealots to DESTROY the functions of government would be a true "deep state".
Republicans want this because it's a LOT QUICKER than changing all the pro-consumer American laws on the books. Project 2025 short-circuits government.
It's a truly evil plan, and it's all written down. See for yourself:
You can actually apply at the link below this paragraph. (Some pasted links don't create the nice graphic-containing links on Tumblr. I don't know why.)
But be warned. They are only looking for diehard fanatics. They have training videos. They're REALLY serious about ending any public say over things that inconvenience oligarchs and prevent christofascism like that pesky 1st amendment.
https://www.project2025.org/
#there is no deep state#trump plans a real deep state#how Republicans plan to destroy every American law and consumer protection#project 2025
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Prop 22 is a scam
If you live in California, you have been blitzed by messages to vote for Prop 22, a rule that would allow Uber, Lyft, Postmates and other money-losing, destructive bezzles to continue to abuse their employees through the fiction that they are "independent contractors."
Prop 22 is the most expensive ballot initiative in California history, with a pricetag of $186m and counting, money transfered from the never-to-be-profitable app companies that have destroyed so many Californian businesses and lives.
https://theweek.com/articles/942798/uber-attempting-colonize-california-government
These companies launched with deep cash reserves from the Saudi royals, funneled through Softbank, and they were a bet that they could monopolize our state's transport, logistics and food by losing money on every transaction until all the real, money-making businesses failed.
That that failed, Plan B was to unload the companies onto naive investors who would reason that if the companies had survived through years of loss-making, there must be a pony underneath that giant pile of manure they'd been burrowing into.
There was no pony. Uber and Lyft drivers earn far below the minimum wage (once you amortize wear and tear on their vehicles) and this only gets worse as the companies seek to staunch their bleeding without raising prices - by cutting drivers' wages.
Under Prop 22, app companies would have an even freer hand to abuse this desperate, precarious workforce as they seek a path to profitability - a path that does not exist and will never exist.
http://horanaviation.com/Uber.html
But Prop 22 has a legacy that will outlast Uber: if it passes, it will become a PERMANENT FIXTURE of our state law: under its language, it can only be repealed or amended by a SEVEN-EIGHTHS MAJORITY. This is not democracy, it is oligarchic tyranny.
Prop 22 has gotten a tailwind thanks to defects in AB5, a California law that tried to address the exploitation of gig workers but managed to capture large numbers of bona-fide freelancers, including writers like me. AB5 is imperfect and needs fixing.
Prop 22 is not that fix. Prop 22 is a license to indenture the most precarious and vulnerable Californians to a Ponzi scheme rigged by oil tyrants half a world away. Vote no on Prop 22.
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The purest embodiment of political nihilism is not Trump himself but his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. In his short lifetime, Kushner has been fraudulently promoted as both a meritocrat and a populist. He was born into a moneyed real-estate family the month Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office, in 1981—a princeling of the second Gilded Age. Despite Jared’s mediocre academic record, he was admitted to Harvard after his father, Charles, pledged a $2.5 million donation to the university. Father helped son with $10 million in loans for a start in the family business, then Jared continued his elite education at the law and business schools of NYU, where his father had contributed $3 million. Jared repaid his father’s support with fierce loyalty when Charles was sentenced to two years in federal prison in 2005 for trying to resolve a family legal quarrel by entrapping his sister’s husband with a prostitute and videotaping the encounter.
Jared Kushner failed as a skyscraper owner and a newspaper publisher, but he always found someone to rescue him, and his self-confidence only grew. In American Oligarchs, Andrea Bernstein describes how he adopted the outlook of a risk-taking entrepreneur, a “disruptor” of the new economy. Under the influence of his mentor Rupert Murdoch, he found ways to fuse his financial, political, and journalistic pursuits. He made conflicts of interest his business model.
So when his father-in-law became president, Kushner quickly gained power in an administration that raised amateurism, nepotism, and corruption to governing principles. As long as he busied himself with Middle East peace, his feckless meddling didn’t matter to most Americans. But since he became an influential adviser to Trump on the coronavirus pandemic, the result has been mass death.
In his first week on the job, in mid-March, Kushner co-authored the worst Oval Office speech in memory, interrupted the vital work of other officials, may have compromised security protocols, flirted with conflicts of interest and violations of federal law, and made fatuous promises that quickly turned to dust. “The federal government is not designed to solve all our problems,” he said, explaining how he would tap his corporate connections to create drive-through testing sites. They never materialized. He was convinced by corporate leaders that Trump should not use presidential authority to compel industries to manufacture ventilators—then Kushner’s own attempt to negotiate a deal with General Motors fell through. With no loss of faith in himself, he blamed shortages of necessary equipment and gear on incompetent state governors.
To watch this pale, slim-suited dilettante breeze into the middle of a deadly crisis, dispensing business-school jargon to cloud the massive failure of his father-in-law’s administration, is to see the collapse of a whole approach to governing. It turns out that scientific experts and other civil servants are not traitorous members of a “deep state”—they’re essential workers, and marginalizing them in favor of ideologues and sycophants is a threat to the nation’s health. It turns out that “nimble” companies can’t prepare for a catastrophe or distribute lifesaving goods—only a competent federal government can do that. It turns out that everything has a cost, and years of attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflict a heavy cost that the public has to pay in lives. All the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation. Then came the virus and this strange defeat.
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Origins
The origins of the present crisis can be traced back to the disintegration of the USSR and independence in 1991. Uniquely among the states of the former USSR and Eastern Bloc, Belarus has so far avoided the shock market therapy which destroyed the bureaucratically planned economies and plunged tens of millions into dire poverty.
Instead, the caste of ex-Soviet bureaucrats — Lukashenko himself is a former manager of a collective farm — transformed themselves into national administrators of state capitalist enterprises and successfully consolidated power at the head of a still largely state-owned economy. The ruling elite’s strategy for maintaining power and social stability has been to conduct a careful balancing act between the expansionist ambitions of Western and Russian imperialism, leveraging the benefits of foreign loans and subsidies while denying its people basic democratic freedoms to suppress internal opposition.
Existing as it does within the confines of an international capitalist market, Belarus’s state-owned and bureaucratically managed economy was unable to attract sufficient foreign investment or develop the productivity of its heavy industry, and became heavily dependent on Russian oil subsidies and export markets. Even today, state industry is responsible for more than 50 percent of GDP. Belarus is very different from the oligarchic capitalism of Ukraine or Russia, but far away from a planned economy: its state industries are organised in holdings operating on the global markets at the centre of which are the three big state banks. With credit growth far outpacing real growth and lacking domestic sources of capital, foreign debt has inevitably risen and was at 80 percent of GDP even before the coronavirus crisis. For more than a decade, Belarus has been in the vicious cycle of debt refinancing, stagnation, currency crisis and price stability problems, increasing its dependence on Russia as a result.
To keep the oil flowing, Lukashenko has indulged successive Russian attempts at greater integration between the two states, but delayed or resisted any decisive moves towards privatisation, which would threaten the dispossession of domestic elites in favour of Russian oligarchs. Likewise, if he followed through on his flirtations with the EU, loans and private investment would no doubt be conditional on “reform”, that is, wholesale opening to market forces.
Despite creeping economic stagnation, for decades Lukashenko was able to redistribute the profits from sales of Russian oil to provide an at least reasonable standard of living for the country’s population, including universal healthcare, free education, subsidised rents, high state pensions, and other state welfare programmes. As a result, his government has been able to maintain a certain degree of legitimacy amongst the rural and urban workers, notwithstanding its iron grip on Belarusian civil society. Periodic expressions of pro-democracy sentiment have failed to win wider support and been easily repressed.
Stagnation
Yet Lukashenko’s stubborn refusal to accept his designated role as Putin’s stooge has led to growing tensions between the two countries, resulting in cuts to Russian oil subsidies and contract disputes frequently interrupting oil supply flows. The increasingly pressing need for economic diversification, alongside a desire to avoid aligning itself with Russia in the Ukraine crisis, have led Lukashenko to make overtures to the European Union, engaging in “dialogue” about economic liberalisation in exchange for increased European aid. But the process has been slow — a fully-fledged partnership and cooperation agreement has been blocked by opposition from Lithuania — and is ultimately limited by the regime’s need to hedge its bets between East and West to maintain its own position.
In recent years, that balancing act has reached its limits. During the deep recession of 2015 to 2017, the highly indebted state was unable to act countercyclically and real income fell by 13 percent as a result of currency devaluation and price increases. Faced with falling growth and increasingly unable, or unwilling, to draw on Moscow’s patronage, Lukashenko has turned to an assault on his own working class to claw back losses and stave off economic disaster. In 2015, the so-called “parasite law” was brought in, forcing anyone not in state-recognised employment to pay a special tax or be sentenced to community service. The decree was withdrawn in 2018, but the unemployed are instead being forced to pay for all state services. A series of amendments to the labour code in 2017 unilaterally shifted 90 percent of workers from permanent to temporary contracts.
Widespread cuts have been implemented across health and education and the retirement age has been raised. All this combined with the steadily falling value of the Belarusian Rouble, has meant a serious decline in the standard of living for Belarusian workers. With the coronavirus crisis, the economic problems of its main trading partner (Russia) and the amount of accumulated debt, Belarus is now on the brink of economic collapse. Given the “crisis management” of Lukashenko during the coronavirus crisis so far, the working class and parts of the ruling class have lost confidence in the ability of the existing regime to prevent the approaching disaster. At the same time, the prolonged shutdown of the global economy is causing both Russia and the EU to re-evaluate their budget priorities.
Protest
Thus, growing discontent with the regime has, for the first time since independence, exploded into a mass popular movement drawing in huge swathes of the working class and backed by industrial action across all sectors and across every part of the country. The scale and breadth of the actions reveals the depths of the country’s political and economic crisis and the authentic character of the uprising; a US-orchestrated “colour revolution” this is not.
In the first few days of protests, the movement’s official demands were limited to calls for new elections monitored by international observers and the release of detained activists but, by Sunday, mass protests were demanding Lukashenko’s immediate resignation. The movement has developed a momentum of its own which is quickly eroding the regime’s legitimacy.
If the protests continue and, crucially, if the strike movement grows to paralyse greater parts of the economy, Lukashenko will face a choice between a bloody crackdown and surrendering power. For now, the regime still controls the police and the military, though there have been reports of some police and army personnel joining demonstrations, and protesters have been filmed appealing to soldiers to join the uprising.
The democracy movement is determined and enjoys mass support; its suppression would be likely to involve prolonged violence, risking defections in the military. Putin has promised Lukashenko military assistance in accordance with the two countries’ military pact, but stopped short of endorsing Lukashenko, who he regards as an altogether unreliable ally. In any case, Russian support would come at a high price; Lukashenko would surely be forced to abandon his policy of constructive ambiguity towards Russia and accept a future as a custodian of a Russian protectorate.
A “managed transition” of some sort may become a preferable alternative for parts of the bureaucracy which will hope to placate the democracy movement but preserve parts of the governing apparatus and reap the profits from any forthcoming privatisations of state-owned enterprises. The democracy movement thus far has little organised political leadership, taking the form of a spontaneous upsurge of popular discontent. Many leaders of the liberal opposition, who support economic liberalisation and full integration into world markets, are in prison or abroad. The movement stands on a critical threshold, what comes next will be determined by what kind of political leadership emerges to channel the discontent.
Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the opposition candidate in last week’s elections, has declared that she is ready to take up the presidency and announced the creation of a national ‘coordination council’ from her self-imposed exile in Lithuania. She stated:
“I ask you to unite in the coordination council. We desperately need your help and experience. We need your connections, contacts, expert advice and support. This coordination council should be joined by everyone interested in dialogue and peaceful transfer of power – working groups, parties, trade unions and other organizations of the civic society.”
Many are now calling for international recognition of Tikhanovskaya’s claim to the presidency and for the EU to mediate negotiations between civil society leaders in exile and the incumbent government. But it would be a catastrophic mistake for the movement to place its faith in the thoroughly capitalist self-appointed leaders of the opposition or their ‘friends’ in the EU. Nor should it recognise a ‘coordination council’ even with bureaucratic union representatives. It is the mass forces of the working class that has brought the movement this far and they should not allow the representatives of the liberal middle classes to reap the fruits of their actions.
Nor will “free elections” on their own alleviate the suffering caused by the contradictions of Belarus’ economy. In fact, unless the mass movement can organise itself around an alternative political programme and prepare to administer the transition itself, Lukashenko’s departure is highly likely to herald a neoliberal programme of privatisations which will further destabilise the economy and turn Belarus into a semi-colony dependent on the EU and Germany.
The experience of Poland and the Baltic states in the 90s shows that this will lead to even greater attacks on workers, unemployment, austerity and inflation which will rapidly erode the remaining protections of workers’ living conditions. Every worker should know: a new “shock therapy” under conditions of accumulated debt and in the circumstances of the global coronavirus crisis would be a social disaster in Belarus. To avoid this kind of “experiment” by the liberal opposition and its “economic experts”, the working class has to have its own organisation and programme to survive this crisis.
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Not that the US-NATO bloc [US+UK+FR nuclear alliance] is the only nuclear threat around. There's still Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel. But Russia and China (despite posturing) are held back pretty strongly by the knowledge that the US-NATO bloc would try to raze them to the ground if they ever even thought about nuclear strikes. Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine and surrounding rhetoric is seriously concerning, but I doubt the nuclear option would be seriously considered for anything short of Putin losing Moscow. Doubly so for India and Pakistan, who mostly have nukes for each other: They could face punitive action from US-NATO, or Russia, or China, or any combination thereof. Not to mention that Delhi striking Islamabad or vice versa would inevitably catastrophic for both nations because of their geographical and ecological connectedness. North Korea might be slightly more willing to launch its small arsenal if there was serious US/SK aggression. Trauma from the American war runs extremely deep and most would accept any measure to avoid repeating it; but North-South rapprochement has been progressing recently, dreams of unification remain on both sides, and NK's ally China would exert a lot of interest in avoiding a regional war. Israel is... probably the most likely candidate for launching the world's third nuke at time of writing. In addition to the Palestinian genocide, its war has now expanded its borders into Lebanon and through missile exhanges involved Syria, Yemen, Jordan, and Iran. As Israel keeps escalating, the retaliations (especially from Iran) might make it paranoid enough to believe that a nuclear strike is the only way out. I sure hope not. Free Palestine, ceasefire now.
Even the old Soviet Union was hesitant about ever actually using nuclear weapons, only really amassing such a stockpile because it was the only way to scare off the US, and they were peers while modern Russia and China are only near that. There's not zero threat from them — especially if the US gets aggressive and makes their governments fearful of a total invasion from which nuclear strikes are the only remaining defense — nuclear arsenals are never a non-threat. It's definitely concerning to see a major nuclear power (Russia) in a hot war with a Western-allied state (Ukraine) on the borders of NATO and the EU, especially with Putin leaning hard on nuclear rhetoric. But if the much more powerful Soviet Union was able to survive complete internal collapse without launching, I think modern Russia will be able to survive losing a war in a neighbouring state. Even if Putin went crazy trying to hold on to power, he's already having trouble keeping his mercenaries from mutinying, I bet one of his generals or fellow oligarchs would shoot him before he could condemn all Russia to hellfire. There are a lot of checks before a major state's nuclear launch, if Vasily Arkhipov and Stanislav Petrov could say "no" despite getting signals of an imminent World War III, I believe someone would say "no" to Putin making a desperate hail mary to save a useless war of aggression.
Israel, though... I could see it happening. All of its neighbors have been turned into enemies, and it's globally unpopular because it's committing genocide. If the war* gets to such a point that Israel feels its pre-war territory is threatened (let alone the Green Line or god forbid the 1947 UN plan), I highly doubt the Knesset will give up or make concessions. They seem committed getting as much land out of this war as possible, without considering loss an option. If they feel like the state of Israel is existentially questioned — beyond how they already act like the mere existence of Palestinians or anti-Zionists is an existential threat** — by means of total collapse or even just a real two-state solution, they may take the drastic option.
It's long been official policy, if clandestinely. All the way back to the Ben-Gurion years, Israel has followed (among other first-strike plans) the Samson Doctrine: Like Samson collapsed the temple he was imprisoned in, Israel plans to react to defeat with a nuclear murder-suicide en masse. And unlike other nuclear "rogue states," the US hasn't really reigned in Israel the way China reigns in the DPRK. If anything, Israel likely believes they could get away with a nuclear strike, because their patron nuclear superpower the US will protect them from Russian or Chinese retaliation. Israel is in a very worrying position: A state surrounded by enemies of its own making, actively at war with many neighbours, inspiring global unpopularity and support for regime change, and struggling to make victories in conventional warfare; but possessing a first-strike nuclear deterrent that none of its regional rivals can match, and the sponsorship of a nuclear superpower to grant it an unhealthy confidence in its protection from retaliation.
So anyway you should maybe pressure the politicians of your country to make clear that your state will support a peaceful transition of power if Israel loses the war, and will actively oppose Israeli use of nuclear weapons. Ideally you should also pressure them to put an arms embargo on Israel, divest from the Israeli economy, and sanction them until they stop committing genocide on the Palestinian people. But even if your country is one of those that geopolitically isn't allowed to be more than "neutral peacenik" on the Israel-Palestine conflict, you should at least get them to commit to "If the anti-Zionist resistance forces regime change in Israel, Israel needs to accept the transfer of power without turning the Levant into a crater. Let some UN weapons inspectors in to denuclearize things before they go boom." Bare minimum.
*"Israel-Hamas" war is such a bad name, especially now that the war has expanded outside Palestine, "5th Arab-Israeli War" is better, but still has an inaccurate generalization of Arabs... "5th Zionist War" might be truest to the central anti/pro Zionist conflict rather than racializing or religionizing the conflict but someone will always complain about saying "Zionism"
**An Israeli cabinet minister and West Bank settler was recently fired for openly suggesting that Gaza be nuked, to give you an idea on the Israeli government's current Overton window when it comes to nuclear weapons. Threatening to nuke Gazans without provacation is just a step too far to say in public, but popular enough to be advocated by major politicians.
Do you ever think about how backwards it is that people who grew up after the Cold War are less fearful of nuclear warfare than people who grew up during? Despite nuclear geopolitics being much messier and uncertain nowadays? I sure do.
It's gotta be some kind of US-centric end-of-history liberal ideology infestation that leads people to think that because the Cold "War" ended the world is more peaceful. Maybe that was forgivable in the early 90s when everyone convinced themselves that liberalized Russia would ally with the West and there would be no more conflict, but there's no excuse past 2001. If anything, the use of nuclear weapons is more likely now than in the MAD years. Sure, there were madmen like MacArthur, Nixon, and Reagan, but they were all held back by their advisors being rightfully wary of an equally-powerful Soviet counterattack. Today, the US is the hegemonic global nuclear superpower just like in 1945, where no one can seriously challenge it militarily. The only thing stopping it from nuking its enemies like in Hiroshima/Nagasaki is the fear that the rest of the world will react poorly. Fear that maybe the UK or France would break up NATO, or that maybe Russia or China would counterattack in solidarity. Even in the case of the latter, neither post-Soviet Russia nor China have nuclear parity with NATO, so a Reaganesque madman might still see it as an exchange the US could still win. The only thing that really scares the hawks out of nuking Iran is the potential of a joint Russo-Chinese counterattack, but that threat relies on the tenuous relationship between two rival continental Great Powers with divergent internal politics and international goals.
I think it was Chomsky who said that the post-Cold War global division of power was in essentially two groups: The US on one, and the sum of global public opinion on the other. That's really the only thing keeping the US from using its nuclear arsenal: fear of global public opinion. Scaring away NATO allies, pushing its political rivals into new military alliances, fomenting dissent in the periphery that could damage the imperial economy. The global public opinion is a much weaker, more fickle, and easier to manipulate thing than the Warsaw Pact was, though! The US got away with doing whatever war crimes they wanted in Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere in Africa and the periphery; despite massive unpopularity, by convincing just enough of the global opinion that it was NATO's job to police terrorism globally. Global opinion couldn't unify in opposition, so the US military got a blank cheque. I sure hope that use of nuclear weapons would be unanimously condemned enough to unify the world against the hegemon, but it's hardly certain. And if I'm unsure if the backlash will be bad enough, what about the beltway war hawks? They probably believe they're untouchable right now. They had Democrats cheering recently for Dick Cheney, the butcher of Iraq!
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Tuesday, March 30, 2021
‘Vaccine passports’ are on the way (Washington Post) The Biden administration and private companies are working to develop a standard way of handling credentials—often referred to as “vaccine passports”—that would allow Americans to prove they have been vaccinated against the novel coronavirus as businesses try to reopen. The effort has gained momentum amid President Biden’s pledge that the nation will start to regain normalcy this summer and with a growing number of companies—from cruise lines to sports teams—saying they will require proof of vaccination before opening their doors again. The passports are expected to be free and available through applications for smartphones, which could display a scannable code similar to an airline boarding pass. Americans without smartphone access should be able to print out the passports, developers have said. U.S. officials say they are grappling with an array of challenges, including data privacy and health-care equity. They want to make sure all Americans will be able to get credentials that prove they have been vaccinated, but also want to set up systems that are not easily hacked or passports that cannot be counterfeited, given that forgeries are already starting to appear. Other countries are racing ahead with their own passport plans, with the European Union pledging to release digital certificates that would allow for summer travel.
Remote Work Is Here to Stay. Manhattan May Never Be the Same. (NYT) A year after the coronavirus sparked an extraordinary exodus of workers from office buildings, what had seemed like a short-term inconvenience is now clearly becoming a permanent and tectonic shift in how and where people work. Employers and employees have both embraced the advantages of remote work, including lower office costs and greater flexibility for employees, especially those with families. Beyond New York, some of the country’s largest cities have yet to see a substantial return of employees, even where there have been less stringent government-imposed lockdowns, and some companies have announced that they are not going to have all workers come back all the time. In recent weeks, major corporations, including Ford in Michigan and Target in Minnesota, have said they are giving up significant office space because of their changing workplace practices, while Salesforce, whose headquarters occupies the tallest building in San Francisco, said only a small fraction of its employees will be in the office full time. But no city in the United States, and perhaps the world, must reckon with this transformation more than New York, and in particular Manhattan, an island whose economy has been sustained, from the corner hot dog vendor to Broadway theaters, by more than 1.6 million commuters every day.
Billions of Cicadas Soon to Emerge From Underground (NYT) A few months of quarantine during the coronavirus pandemic? That’s nothing for a swarm of cicadas that have been underground since 2004. In the time that the United States has seen the Boston Red Sox break an 86-year World Series drought, five presidential elections, a deadly pandemic and an insurrection, these creatures have been minding their own business, burrowed in the soil. Now billions of cicadas, from a group known as Brood X, are expected to emerge in the next few weeks, just in time to help orchestrate the soundtrack of summer. Brood X is expected to emerge in about 18 states, scientists say.
Against the odds, Cuba could become a coronavirus vaccine powerhouse (Washington Post) Cuban leader Fidel Castro vowed to build a biotech juggernaut in the Caribbean, advancing the idea in the early 1980s with six researchers in a tiny Havana lab. Forty years later, the communist island nation could be on the cusp of a singular breakthrough: Becoming the world’s smallest country to develop not just one, but multiple coronavirus vaccines. Five vaccine candidates are in development, two in late-stage trials with the goal of a broader rollout by May. Should they prove successful, the vaccines would be an against-the-odds feat of medical prowess — as well as a public relations coup — for an isolated country of 11 million that was added back to the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism in the final days of the Trump administration. Cuban officials say they’re developing cheap and easy-to-store serums. They are able to last at room temperature for weeks, and in long-term storage as high as 46.4 degrees, potentially making them a viable option for low-income, tropical countries that have been pushed aside by bigger, wealthier nations in the international scrum for coronavirus vaccines. If Phase 3 trials are positive, Cuban authorities said this week, they would move to a vast “intervention study” that would inoculate almost all the residents of Havana, or 1.7 million people, by May. By August, they would aim to reach 60 percent of the national population, with the rest getting doses by year’s end.
Ukraine wants to show Biden it’s serious about ending ‘oligarch era.’ That’s not so easy. (Washington Post) The word of the moment in Ukrainian politics is “de-oliharkhizatsia” or de-oligarchization: a renewal of the long-held goal—and sometimes only faint hope—to free the country’s political system of domination by the ultrarich. Whether President Volodymyr Zelensky can deliver may set the tone for relations with the Biden administration. “The threat from within [Ukraine] is corruption . . . a lack of institutions that can effectively manage the country,” said Antony Blinken, now secretary of state, during his confirmation hearing in January. “If that threat continues, [it’s] going to be very difficult for them to build a viable democracy.” But Zelensky, a 43-year-old former comedian, has made only limited headway against the oligarchs’ grip since his election two years ago. The oligarchs’ power in Ukraine reaches deep into areas such energy, mining and media—giving a clique of billionaires the clout to shape political and policy decisions. Ukraine is on notice that greater Western aid and international loans are contingent on trimming back their influence. A $5 billion loan deal from the International Monetary Fund is on hold as the Ukrainians try to convince IMF officials that they are serious about tackling corruption.
Inside Myanmar’s Army: ‘They See Protesters as Criminals’ (NYT) Myanmar’s military, the Tatmadaw, which says it has a standing force of up to half a million men, is often portrayed as a robotic rank of warriors bred to kill. Since ousting Myanmar’s civilian leadership last month, setting off nationwide protests, it has only sharpened its savage reputation, killing more than 420 people and assaulting, detaining or torturing thousands of others, according to a monitoring group. On Saturday, the deadliest day since the Feb. 1 coup, security forces killed more than 100 people, according to the United Nations. Among them were seven children, including two 13-year-old boys and a 5-year-old boy. In-depth interviews with four officers, two of whom have deserted since the coup, paint a complex picture of an institution that has thoroughly dominated Myanmar for six decades. From the moment they enter boot camp, Tatmadaw troops are taught that they are guardians of a country that will crumble without them. They occupy a privileged state within a state, in which soldiers live, work and socialize apart from the rest of society, imbibing an ideology that puts them far above the civilian population. The officers described being constantly monitored by their superiors, in barracks and on Facebook. A steady diet of propaganda feeds them notions of enemies at every corner, even on city streets. The cumulative effect is a bunkered worldview, in which orders to kill unarmed civilians are to be followed without question. “They see protesters as criminals because if someone disobeys or protests the military, they are criminal,” said Captain Tun Myat Aung, an officer who defected to the ranks of the anti-coup demonstrators
Thai police vow more protest arrests after nearly 100 detained (Reuters) Thai police on Monday vowed to arrest more people participating in anti-government protests after detaining nearly 100 at a demonstration a day earlier, citing a law restricting gatherings to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Another protest demanding the release of jailed activists is planned for late Monday afternoon, raising prospects for another confrontation with activists calling for an end to military dominance of politics and reform of the powerful monarchy. Dozens of people have been detained at protests in recent months under disease control and public order laws, but Sunday’s protest represented one of the largest number of arrests at a single rally.
Metro Manila, outlying provinces go on lockdown (AP) Philippine officials placed Metropolitan Manila and four outlying provinces, a region of more than 25 million people, back to a lockdown Monday at the height of the Lenten and Easter holiday travel season as they scrambled to control an alarming surge in coronavirus infections. Only workers, government security and health personnel and residents on urgent errands would be allowed out of homes during the weeklong restrictions, which prohibited leisure trips and religious gatherings that forced the dominant Roman Catholic church to shift all its Holy Week and Easter activities online. The renewed lockdown brought President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration under fire for what critics say was its failed handling of the pandemic.
Lebanon could sink like Titanic, parliament speaker says (Reuters) Influential parliamentary speaker Nabih Berri said on Monday that Lebanon would sink like the Titanic if it could not form a government. Prime minister-designate Saad al-Hariri and President Michel Aoun have been at loggerheads over a new cabinet for months, dashing hopes of a reversal of Lebanon’s deepening financial meltdown. Parliament was due to discuss a $200 million emergency fund to pay for fuel for Lebanon’s electricity company. The energy ministry has said there are no funds to pay for imports beyond March. The Zahrani power plant, one of Lebanon’s four main electricity producers, has shut down after its fuel ran out.
Pleas for more aid to Syria (AP) At age 19, Fatima al-Omar is at her wits’ end. In the last year alone, she lost her home to fighting in Syria’s last rebel-held enclave and her mother was diagnosed with cancer. She became the sole breadwinner for her mother, three siblings and grandmother as they moved around between shelters. Then the coronavirus struck, aggravating conditions in northwest Syria just as new fighting had uprooted 1 million people—the biggest wave of displacement in the country’s 10-year war. By late 2020, al-Omar contracted COVID-19, costing her the last job she had picking olives. She hasn’t been able to find work since and is now at risk of another eviction. Despite the worsening humanitarian situation across war-ravaged Syria, it’s been getting tougher every year to raise money from global donors to help people like al-Omar. The aid community is bracing for significant shortfalls ahead of a donor conference that starts Monday in Brussels and is being co-hosted by the United Nations and the European Union. Pledges were already dropping off before the coronavirus pandemic mainly due to donor fatigue. Officials fear that with the global economic downturn spurred by the pandemic, international assistance for Syria is about to take a new hit just when it is needed most. Earlier this month, a U.N. appeal for aid to Yemen, the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, was less than 50% funded, in what U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres called a disappointment. According to the U.N., 13.4 million people in Syria, more than half the country’s pre-war population, need assistance. That’s a 20% increase from last year.
Whatever Floats the Boat (Foreign Policy) The Ever Given, the super container vessel that ran aground in the Suez Canal last Tuesday was successfully refloated in the early hours of Monday morning following days of excavation attempts. A team of high-powered tugboats appeared to have ultimately made the difference, after days of work from excavators and dredgers to free the ship after it became wedged in the Egyptian sand. The boat will now head north for further inspection. Meanwhile, navigation is to resume “immediately” afterward, according to the Suez Canal Authority. Mohab Mamish, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s adviser for the Suez Canal, said it will take roughly a week to clear the remaining ships out of the canal once the Ever Given is under way. Dealing with the backlog that has accumulated north and south of the canal will likely take more than twice as long. The refloating heads off more economic damage for Egypt, which was losing roughly $15 million in fees for each day the canal was not operational.
While the world tore its hair out over the Suez, Russia saw an opportunity (Washington Post) Russian officials are seizing on the Suez Canal blockage saga to promote its Northern Sea Route, an ambitious infrastructure plan being pushed by President Vladimir Putin that aims to capitalize on the polar ice melt from global warming by opening up Arctic shipping and development. Russia’s Energy Ministry said Monday that the days-long blockage of the canal by Rotterdam-bound Ever Given showed that its Northern Sea Route (NSR) and gas and oil pipelines were reliable, secure and competitive “in comparison to alternative routes.” Russia last year released a sweeping plan to open up the Arctic shipping route, which includes building a fleet of dozens of nuclear icebreakers and other ships, mapping natural resources in the region and developing airports, ports and railways in northern Russia. In 2020, Russia’s meteorological agency said the ice cover in the Arctic sea route had reached a record low.
As Militants Seize Mozambique Gas Hub, a Dash for Safety Turns Deadly (NYT) As gunshots rang out across a port town in northeastern Mozambique on Friday afternoon, nearly 200 people sheltering inside the Amarula Palma hotel confronted a devastating reality: The armed insurgents outside the hotel’s doors had all but taken control of the town and there was no one coming to save them any time soon. For two days, hundreds of insurgents in the gas-rich region had been laying siege to the coastal town of Palma, firing indiscriminately at civilians, hunting down government officials and setting buildings ablaze as security forces tried in vain to repel them. The violence sent thousands of people fleeing, with some rushing to the beach, where a ragtag fleet of cargo ships, tugboats and fishing vessels was ferrying people to safety. But at the hotel, with daylight hours dwindling, the local residents and foreign gas workers who remained faced an impossible choice: Either wait inside, defenseless, for a promised evacuation in the morning, or try to make it to the beach. In a desperate dash, dozens of people crammed into a 17-vehicle convoy and left the hotel for the oceanfront. Only seven vehicles completed the trip. Militants ambushed the convoy after it left the hotel grounds, setting on the occupants of the cars. Many arrived at the beach bloodied. Many never made it at all. American officials said 40 to 50 foreigners alone were feared dead in the attack. By Saturday night the insurgents had completely overrun the town, leaving scores of people unaccounted for and feared dead.
Tree mortality (The Guardian) Since 2010, 129 million trees are estimated to have died in California’s national forests alone. Around the globe, research has suggested that the tree mortality rate in some temperate and tropical forests has doubled or more in recent decades. While normally the life cycle of forests dictates that the ecosystem regrows after forest fires, this is no longer the case. Across the globe, researchers have found that large areas of trees and other plant life have stopped regrowing following wildfires. Forest mortality researchers say while this does not mark the end of the forests, it may well be the end of many forests as we’ve known them. Iconic species such as Giant Sequoias and Joshua trees are succumbing to the effects of climate change in remarkable numbers, while massive ecosystems such as the Amazon rainforest and Siberia’s boreal forests are also suffering. The main factors for increased forest mortality include a hotter climate and increased vulnerability to insects and disease. Researchers have acknowledged ambiguity in their tree mortality predictions, but widespread health problems in forests are prompting a broad and looming sense of disquiet.
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by Denny Hunt for GetWisdom.com
Introduction:
Karl Mollison is a research scientist and psychic medium and has discovered the means through which a tiny percentage of people throughout history have successfully made direct contact with God, Creator of All That Is. With this ability, he has done what any reasonable person in such an unusual and surprising situation would do: ask endless questions! Why is God invisible to us? Why is there rampant evil in the world? Are there dark unseen forces working against us? Why has God not intervened to stop it? Why do good people suffer?
His quest to find the secrets of the Universe led him to real answers for human suffering in the form of a Lightworker Healing Protocol. This protocol is basically a high level prayer to God, for healing; not just any healing, but deep healing from dark spirit infestation, karmic healing from past traumas, and well as emotional and physical healing. The direct contact with God in this case was, and continues to be, in service to healing and not just satisfying curiosity. This fact alone gives some credentials that should be considered seriously before judgment is passed.
Now, it seems, we are about to experience an event being called “disclosure” where allegedly the world’s governments will finally admit to contact with extraterrestrials or the ET’s themselves will make their presence known to humankind. There are many scenarios and claims about this thing called disclosure. Karl has asked many questions about this in his channelings with Source Creator.
This is one of them:
QUESTION:
Pres. Ronald Reagan, in a speech to the United Nations to encourage greater cooperation among nations, proposed the idea that if the world were faced with an extraterrestrial invader, we would come together to protect the common interests of humanity. This has been remarked on a number of times as perhaps a telling slip because he has been rumored to have been told there was a large fleet of vessels built by the U.S. military and capable of space travel, so he was aware of the long-standing collaboration of the U.S. government with extraterrestrials. Photos of his typed speech text show this comment was crossed out, which has been attributed to someone in his inner circle editing the speech beforehand, but he rewrote the remark by hand just prior to giving the speech and then delivered it in public. Was this done at the behest of the Extraterrestrial Alliance to test the waters about making disclosure of an extraterrestrial agenda, or was it perhaps divine inspiration to encourage planting a seed about the extraterrestrial presence being a reality?
ANSWER:
“Writers have disclosed that Reagan was told about the Secret Space Program, that creation of many spacecraft developed with the cooperation of the presumed benevolent extraterrestrials was a reality, and that the purpose was for protection of the planet from hostile alien invaders that could become a serious problem. So Reagan was primed with the party line, so to speak, that this Secret Space Program, which you know to be truly the Mercenary Army Program, was not only a helpful adjunct but critical to the future of the world, so he took this to heart and felt quite strongly that it would benefit the world to truly be aware of this. That was the reason for its inclusion in the text of the speech to begin with, as it was a divine suggestion to have this stated openly in order to make people aware, finally, of the reality of the extraterrestrial presence in the world.
So the fact he mentioned this, was not a desire of the Extraterrestrial Alliance at that point in time to make people aware that a Secret Space Program existed, and was far advanced, because they knew it would raise too many uncomfortable questions. This was a divine inspiration for him to include this comment because it was capitalizing on his humanitarian desire for world peace, and the fact that it was edited out was truly an attempt to avoid disclosing, even through inference, top secret information. The impulse for him to override this normal crosscheck to avoid a mistake was divine and the purpose, as you saw intuitively, was to instill the idea of an extraterrestrial presence in people’s thinking. Everyone who heard his speech and everyone who hears a replay of his speech today, is given a divine impulse to pay attention to its true meaning—that there is an extraterrestrial presence, the extraterrestrials are real, they are here, and it is a threat to the world that warrants the world coming together with a common purpose and goal of seeing these interlopers be removed.”
I like to use deductive logic or the law enforcement approach when they are investigating a crime; it is a method of inquiry where I consider motive, means and opportunity. It doesn’t always give me the right answer, but I can sometimes save myself some false moves along the way and also end up with the most plausible answer.
Let’s look at some of the more popular disclosure narratives and see what we come up with.
1) This version of disclosure deals with the possibility that the world’s governments, one or more of them, will finally admit that there are ET’s and they know about them and have interacted with them and obtained technologies. Disclosure will result in the dissemination of free energy technologies with the result being that the state will no longer be able to control the population in terms of labor slavery, taxation, monetary controls, and victimless crimes, etc. It is kind of utopian speculation about what humans would do if they had free energy and transportation devices that unshackled them from the fascist oligarchs that run the world. A new type of technological freedom will spread all over the world. Manipulative governments and multi-national corporations would subside into the past and become irrelevant. Sober anarchism with the credo - do no harm would rise to the top like cream. In some versions, some form of dimensional ascension would follow.
2) In this disclosure narrative the claim is that ET’s are all benevolent and if they weren’t, they would’ve already eliminated humans so they could occupy earth unhindered. Perhaps they are just respecting our free will while we work out the kinks. Enjoying the hapless humans as if it were a spectator sport. Rooting for them from the sidelines. Except if we get too far off, like using nukes, they would step in for more direct guidance. They are going to show up because the cabal has gone too far with their enslavement plans or population reduction plans and their disrespect for nature. When they present themselves, they will let us come to our senses and accept their guidance and assistance. In some versions, some form of dimensional ascension would follow.
3) There are bad ET’s, good ET’s and some ambivalent/observer ET’s and they are all part of what some claim is this large collection of ET races that occupy this part of the galaxy and they are going to make themselves known to humans on earth due to a variety of factors depending on the version within this category of disclosure. Then the onus is on humans collectively to decide how to navigate within this mass of competing agendas where some ET’s want us dead, some want to exploit us, some want to trade with us and some want to help us. Most of these narratives are quite complex because obviously there are factions of humans who will align with different factions of ET’s and then there might be a political free-for-all where the spiritual aspect is also in play and potentially influencing outcomes. Many proponents of narratives within this category are channelers and/or contactees who portray themselves as academic or providers of lofty and higher-level spiritual concepts. They often fancy themselves as teachers or those in possession of esoteric knowledge. In fact, entire religions and cults are often found within this category of disclosure explanations.
4) There are basically some good ET’s and then there are some bad ET’s and they are both going to appear in some fashion and for some good reason so that we can select which ones to partner with for spiritual/economic alignment and protection. This is a compelling narrative because it is very similar to our alleged history of good vs. evil and prosaic myths of spiritual conquests of light over dark; the good guy/bad guy stories that we never get tired of reading, seeing or hearing. In some ways this is a subset of #3, but I list it separately because of its obvious appeal and the likelihood that this narrative will gain prominence as things unfold. It also works nicely with the savior stories that we find in legends, myths and religions.
Most of these scenarios will put humans in an observer role. We might have a role in what happens, but it will be along the lines of voting, where whoever gets to count the vote ends up deciding what actually happens. We are constantly checking our beloved smart phones to see what is supposedly happening and what is likely to happen next. One of these versions has to be true, right?
The last one we’ll consider is what we have learned at GetWisdom.com, i.e., the channeling work of Karl Mollison, where he is channeling departed people who have returned to the Light and/or Creator. In this narrative we are told that there are no benevolent ET’s in contact with humans on the earth plane. They are all evil and have, as their next goal, the elimination of humans once and for all. There is no particular reason to get rid of us, other than the fact we are unruly and considered high maintenance given the return on investment.
These evil ET’s upon finding us here on earth again—yes, we were here once before and what we call the Divine Human Free Will Experiment failed the first time around—they set about to genetically modify us such that we would have a poor connection to our higher selves and no connection to our deep subconscious. This made us the perfect hosts for disincarnate evil spirits which infect us humans, AND for the ET cohort that currently runs the earth to control us in the manner they see fit. This cohort is comprised of the Anunnaki, the Arcturians (creators of the soul-less alien grey biological robots) and the Reptilians. They have a tenuous and strained alliance to control the earth along with all the humans, which they use as a food source, entertainment, and as an energetic host for the evil parasitic entities that infest them and almost all humans on earth at this time. They are atheistic beings with ancient civilizations, incredible technologies and psychic abilities that dwarf most of what us humans can even imagine. Even their soul-less robots can make us fall in love at will and convince us of outlandish things with mind control capabilities and technologies that are quite beyond anything we could currently comprehend. The robotic alien Greys have a peculiar interest in us because they think they can crack the DNA code which will enable them to reincarnate. This situation has perhaps bought us some additional time. One of these alien races has been engaged with us almost from the beginning of our Creation. We were created on earth by Creator and the Divine Realm based on the DNA of four races of higher dimensional ET’s, including the Pleiadians and the Sirians. These higher dimensional ET’s have a hands-off policy and are letting this Divine Human Free Will Experiment play out in accordance with the Divine Realm’s rules for this earthly adventure.
So I would claim that this GetWisdom.com version of things is not really a disclosure narrative, because it does not rely on the government or the ET’s doing anything as we see in the other descriptions, 1 through 4 above. In the examples above, either the government(s) are going to admit or reveal something to the general public or the ET’s or some faction thereof are going to present themselves or let themselves be “discovered.” What is claimed here is not a situation where we are going to wait to see what happens. In other words, we already know what is happening and why.
You could say, we are pre-empting disclosure. We are giving you the low-down before it really happens. The problem with our version is that it appears to be uniformly bad news. There is no silver lining in this advance warning. We’ll get to that later. For now, let’s look at these other disclosure narratives and see what they have to offer and whether they can pass the smell test.
1. There seems to be one consistent thing throughout human history; there is always the state or a controlling religion or an upper class oligarchy running the show. What would be the motivation for any of those to reveal something like free energy technologies? How would they be ‘forced’ or compelled to do something like that? How would they benefit? Some in this camp have claimed that there will be some sort of event where there is a solar flash which results in a higher state of consciousness for humans; an ascension story that goes along with the disclosure. Perhaps that is how these oligarchs come to their senses and decide that everyone should get access to free energy technologies. Does that pass the smell test? Where do the ET’s fit in? Do they stand idly by as us humans get intergalactic toys, limitless abundance and somehow a more mature and egalitarian mindset in the bargain? I think there are some compelling aspects to this disclosure narrative, but you kind of have to ignore some other truths when looking at the current state of affairs and the seeming trajectory of human history.
2. If the ET’s are all benevolent what were they doing when the Soviet government was killing more than 60 million of their own people? Or what were they doing when the US dropped nuclear bombs on Japan? Or when Mao Tse-Tung was exterminating his population of Chinese citizens? Or when the gas chambers in Nazi Germany were running at full tilt in 1944? Is this just part of the free will experiment as defined by these same ‘benevolent’ ET’s? For me, this is the weakest disclosure narrative of them all. I am surprised that there are still so many people who believe that all of the ET’s out there are benevolent. Some say that this is like a hostage situation where these benevolent ET’s are not going to make their move because the evil human government would do even more damage to humans and the environment. That doesn’t make sense to me. Does it make sense to you?
3. This might be the most intelligent and thus compelling of all the disclosure narratives competing for our attention and ultimately, belief. It seems to fit the ‘as above, so below’ credo from ancient and wise esoteric principles except for what seems to be only a few minor problems. Some of the more popular proponents of this disclosure scenario will explain that humans have been relatively unmolested by negative ET’s and that these ‘enemy ET’s’ will only present themselves in response to humans expanding into space and asserting ownership claims beyond the earth. They couch the problems that will confront humans as simply ones of lacking knowledge as opposed to moral or spiritual issues. The existing problems remain obscure in terms of their causes and the possible cures. There is the enigma of “out there” representing a place where the answers reside because there is already an established ET community waiting for our mutual discovery. So some of the big questions related to this ET and disclosure issue remain unanswered. Who can we really count on to have the power to see that truth and justice prevail? There is a danger not well defined and a promise equally obscure and we are left clinging to a source that is, at least, recognizing that there might be a problem.
4. This is the one that might emerge as the leader due to the conditioning that humans have already received over many thousands of years. We call it the savior programming. The probable timeline might look something like this: humans muddle through the next several years with earth’s governments falling into abject idiocy in their attempts to create the ideal Orwellian society to serve the ruling elite, with each turn exposing their hand and their intentions for the global population. This continues until a crisis like a hot world war breaks out or a ‘citizen’ revolution or a pandemic similar to the current COVID-19 one takes a more significant chunk of the human population out of commission either through death and/or economic destruction and then that would be the turning point for disclosure. Then, the ET’s arrive with a developing offer to assist in a planet-wide recovery, either with or without the cooperation of various so-called governmental institutions (such as the US, Russian and/or Chinese intelligence/military’s) cooperation. That might be what everyone will call disclosure. Some alien race appears to save us from this mess. Maybe these benevolent ET’s are working with a human faction of white hat operatives to assist? From that, any number of explanations and demonstrations may follow for the sake of convincing the skeptical. The demonstrations of prowess in technology and healing might make a convincing case that some sort of alliance would be the smart move and the need for this alliance would likely involve an evil ET cohort that may be portrayed as the backing for the old elite and Satanic power brokers and their controlling influence on all of the institutions that have failed human kind. There are other plausible scenarios that could be used that would be equally as convincing. Take your pick.
All of them in one form or another have been nurtured in our media, in Hollywood movies and in the great science fiction novels and our legends and myths going back to before Biblical times. The fact is that the ET’s have been operating on our planet all through history, without helping us in any way, but rather causing untold harm. Who else is carrying out the countless abductions of humans through deception or without their consent? If it is the dark ET’s who already have the Earth in its grip, would they allow benevolent ET’s to displace them when they have humanity as hostages? Do we want an alien war in our midst?
The unfortunate fact, and this is being demonstrated as I write, is that a majority of the earth’s population can be made to believe and do some things that are demonstrably self-destructive and damaging to their long-term survival. We have been dumbed down to the point of being easy targets for any number of disclosure scenarios. This is a green light for any of the above described disclosure schemes. Almost any of them could be made to work.
Disclosure, in practically every one of its forms, is a psy-op. There is really no clearer explanation.
Right now, the price of disclosure is the final, successful and terminal blow to humanity and the Divine Human Free Will Experiment. The second great failure, if you will. The Divine Realm tells us that the purpose of disclosure is to lull us into a false sense of security, to trust ET’s who have been corrupting and subjugating us for centuries from behind the scenes, and allow them to operate out in the open. This is a modern Trojan horse deception, and if we accept their offer, we will be choosing sides with the interlopers. Because the Divine Realm must allow free will, this will mean the undoing of humanity.
This outcome can be changed, but it will take many more people involved in REAL healing and not lip service to benign and empty platitudes, or political schemes of any kind or appeals to our imaginary space brothers or any of the other scenarios predicated on our savior programming installed eons ago.
One of the most telling questions you can ask yourself right now is “Why am I here?” Do any of these disclosure narratives attempt to give you that answer? Is that question even related to the idea of disclosure? If there are ET’s, irrespective of whether they have positive or negative orientation, does that have anything to do with why you are here?
What we have been told by the Divine Realm is that you are here and I am here and everyone else is here to solve the problem of evil and that we are using an extreme version of a free will environment to do that. We are here to heal our perpetrators; the ones who have subjugated us for thousands of years. That sounds even more outlandish than all the disclosure narratives combined, but I am convinced this is true. It is really the only truth claim that can be used to make any sense out of what we are seeing.
The key to doing this and the chance we have to do such a thing in the face of such overwhelming odds, is our ability to form a partnership with our Creator and with all of the beings in the Light (or Heaven by some accounts) or what we call the Divine Realm. That is our origin and birthright and that is the secret weapon, if you will, that has enabled humans throughout history to survive such horrendous tragedies in history.
But now we have to do more than survive. We have to heal our perpetrators to the point where they will take their evil away from earth. This will give us a respite and a chance to heal ourselves. This will create a future, for the first time in human history, where we can thrive and grow and reach our full potential as Light Beings incarnated as Divine Humans. This reality is not currently conceivable to us. We can only dimly see what this might be like. Words will fail to do this reality any justice whatsoever, but that is our potential destiny.
Remember at the beginning of this article where I wrote, “secrets of the Universe led him to real answers for human suffering in the form of a Lightworker Healing Protocol. This protocol is basically a high level prayer to God, for healing”? This is what we can use to heal these sociopathic ET’s and their complement of dark discarnate spirits that also infest us. We are love-based beings. Most of us know this intuitively. In our natural state we do not fight and create wars and willingly kill each other. This is an external disease that can be eradicated once and for all. Even the most extreme cases and most depraved beings can be healed enough to save humanity from the consequences of disclosure and its inevitable fall-out.
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this is also *after* they survived Saakashvili going through with a hatchet
both from 2020
Mikheil Saakashvili, the former president of Georgia, has been installed in a top position co-ordinating reforms in Ukraine, where the war-battered economy has been plunged into a deep recession by the coronavirus crisis. President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday appointed the exiled Georgian politician head of the executive committee of Ukraine’s National Reform Council after an earlier plan to make him deputy premier ran into political opposition. “I believe that he will be able to give an impetus to the National Reform Council and help make important changes in the life of the country,” Mr Zelensky said in a statement after appointing Mr Saakashvili. Mr Saakashvili said that Ukraine needed to “speed up the anti-bureaucratic revolution” begun after Mr Zelensky’s election as president last year. “Either we tackle corruption through deregulation, shutting down opportunities for extortion and deliver on the crackdown on corruption, or the country might cease to exist,” he told the FT.[...]
One of Mr Saakashvili’s tasks could be smoothing the way to an emergency loan programme from the IMF. Kyiv and the fund were negotiating an 18-month loan programme rather than a three-year standby facility, the IMF said on Thursday. While trying to drum up support for his appointment, Mr Saakashvili in a Financial Times interview late last month urged the IMF to “at least double” the loans it envisaged making to shore up Ukraine’s economy this year. He said an $8bn loan programme offered by the IMF with nearly $4bn disbursed this year “is not enough”.[...]
Ukraine’s business community was initially concerned by the return of a politician with a strong reform record while serving as president of Georgia but also known for falling out with political allies. But it has become more hopeful that Mr Saakashvili could speed up reforms, such as deregulation and securing more affordable lending for small businesses in an economy dominated by oligarchs. The business community has also supported Mr Saakashvili’s calls for more IMF funding this year.
“The private business community does feel, because of the economic storm Ukraine faces with the pandemic and global recession and conflict in Donbas, that Ukraine needs additional funding from the IMF,” said Morgan Williams, President of the US-Ukraine Business Council.
“I am deeply convinced that economic recovery and overcoming the crisis can only be done by easing regulations and lowering taxes,” Mr Saakashvili said in a Facebook post this week. “I will remind you that in Georgia we reduced taxes by 62 per cent and this led to unprecedented four times growth of the economy!!!” he added.
[RFE/RL is US State Media]
The council was created in 2014 to carry out strategic planning and coordinate reforms. Saakashvili, 52, served as Georgia’s president from 2004 until 2013. In January 2018, a Georgian court convicted him in absentia of covering up evidence in the case of the killing of a Georgian banker and sentenced him to three years in prison. In June 2018, another court convicted him of abuse of power and sentenced him to six years in prison. Saakashvili has denied all the accusations and says the charges are politically motivated. In 2015-2016, Saakashvili served as governor of Ukraine’s Odesa region. When he resigned, he accused Zelenskiy’s predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, of corruption. Poroshenko, in turn, stripped Saakashvili of his Ukrainian citizenship.
As one of his first acts as president last year, Zelenskiy restored Saakashvili’s Ukrainian citizenship, facilitating Saakshvili’s return to Ukraine. Last month, Saakashvili said he had been offered the post of deputy prime minister in charge of reform. But it was unclear if parliament would confirm him. Georgia called the possible appointment “unacceptable” in view of Saakashvili’s convictions there and threatened to withdraw its ambassador to Kyiv for consultations.
every time another piece of news comes out about how the united states is pressuring the ukrainian government to institute brutal austerity measures and sell every part of the national infrastructure that isn't nailed down i think about the amount of vitriol and pushback i got for saying that the usa & friends did not in fact have the best interests of the ukrainian people at heart
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February 21, 2020 (Friday)
More news today about the intelligence briefing that led to Trump firing acting Director of Intelligence Joseph Maguire.
First of all, observers see the replacement of an intelligence officer who reported the truth with a toady as a five-alarm fire. Today, retired Admiral William H. McRaven, the commander who oversaw the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, broke the military’s reluctance to comment on politics with an op-ed in the Washington Post. Discussing the firing of Maguire, he concluded: “As Americans, we should be frightened — deeply afraid for the future of the nation. When good men and women can’t speak the truth, when facts are inconvenient, when integrity and character no longer matter, when presidential ego and self-preservation are more important than national security — then there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil.”
Political writer Greg Sargent was clear: [L]et’s not mince words: Trump and his GOP defenders appear to be actively abetting an attack on our country.” He points out that a bipartisan Senate investigation concluded that Russia targeted voting systems in all 50 states in 2016, likely so they could figure out how it worked for future havoc. Their goal is “undermining the integrity of elections and American confidence in democracy.”
And Trump and GOP leaders are letting it happen.
The intelligence briefing that so angered Trump, in which intelligence officials warned members of the congressional intelligence committees that Russia was working for Trump’s reelection, also delivered the news that Russia has been working to promote the candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT). And yet, given information they could use against a Democrat at a crucial moment, Trump and his people instead said that this information just proves the party is against Sanders, precisely what it appears Russian propagandists are saying.
(For his part, when asked about it, Sanders said he had received a briefing “about a month ago” but had not revealed it publicly because “I go to many intelligence briefings which I don’t reveal to the public.” In a statement, he said: “I don’t care, frankly, who [Russian President Vladimir] Putin wants to be president…. My message to Putin is clear: Stay out of American elections, and as president I will make sure that you do.”)
Tonight, news broke that Trump is planning to prevent the publication of John Bolton’s book, which allegedly ties Trump directly to the Ukraine Scandal, until after the election. Trump plans to declare that everything he said to Bolton while he was Trump’s National Security Advisor was classified. He says Bolton is “a traitor.”
The book’s publication date is March 17, but if it comes out without the final approval of the National Security Council Bolton might face a criminal investigation and, possibly, forfeit his seven-figure advance. Since Bolton was well aware of the limits of what he could safely talk about, and since his lawyer’s initial letter about the final classified check reminded the office that it should be seen only by the person responsible for checking it, not by the president’s people, and since the White House made and circulated multiple copies, it seems to me likely Bolton would win in a legal struggle with Trump. But that will take a long time.
Meanwhile, Trump has been purging the White House of anyone who cooperated with the impeachment probe, but now has expanded that purge, instructing his aides to identify anyone not considered sufficiently loyal to the president so they can be forced out. Apparently, Jared Kushner and Trump’s children have been key players in making this push, intending to concentrate more power amongst themselves.
This is the key reason to put Richard Grenell at the head of national intelligence, along with former Nunes aide Kash Patel. Already, Grenell has asked for information from the CIA and other intelligence agencies about the information that Russia is already attacking the 2020 election. Looking at intelligence is, of course, now his job, although his fitness for the position was thrown into question even further today when news broke that, although he never registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, he worked for a Moldovan oligarch who is now a fugitive banned from the U.S. Patel was the lead author of the “Nunes Memo” of two years ago, accusing FBI and Justice Department officials of starting the Russia investigation because they were biased against Trump. It is a matter of concern that Grenell and Patel are now in charge of the information about Russian attacks on our country today.
Hiring people based on their loyalty to Trump means that the competent leadership has been replaced by people whose major skill is their ability to please a man whose interests do not run to deep understanding. This is consistent with the GOP idea that government is useless and should be dismantled, and that businessmen should control the levers of power instead of politicians.
Today, a video circulated of Richard Grenell, US Ambassador to Germany and now our acting Director of National Intelligence, saying that there is no need to have an embassy staff analyzing political currents in foreign countries because “we can get that information off the internet.” Instead, he wants to revamp embassies to make them “mini-commerce sections” full of “economic specialists.” (The State Department, of course, became the power it is now after WWII proved that economic interests demanded a thorough understanding of other nations’ cultures and politics, and careful, long-term diplomacy to enable us to work out differences with other countries.)
Perhaps even more disturbing at this particular moment is that the U.S. currently has no expert at the National Security Council who specializes in pandemics. The World Health Organization (WHO) warned today that the window is closing for containing the worldwide spread of the coronavirus (officially SARS-CoV-2) after new cases turned up in Lebanon and Iran. But in May 2018, when he was National Security Advisor, Bolton broke up the team in charge of global health security and pushed out its leader, Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer.
It is clear that the administration does not have a clear plan for managing the disease. There is already finger-pointing and anger today over the fact that State Department officials and a top Trump official overruled officials of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention to evacuate 14 Americans infected with coronavirus in an airplane from Japan with 314 uninfected passengers.
The Americans were traveling on the cruise ship the Diamond Princess out of Yokohama for a 15-day cruise when it turned out the ship had carried a man with the virus for 5 days before he left to go to a hospital. The ship returned to Yokohama where Japanese officials quarantined the passengers for fourteen days to make sure there were no other cases. There were. The disease spread on the ship, and after two weeks, the State Department decided to evacuate the Americans. But, once the Americans were aboard buses to the airport, lab reports showed that 14 were infected. Officials from the CDC explicitly recommended that they not be evacuated with the others, but were overruled. CNN reported today that Trump was not told ahead of time that the infected passengers would be brought back home along with the others, and is furious.
And one final note: Roger Stone is trying to get a new trial, based on the idea that the jury in his first trial was biased. He has asked Judge Amy Berman Jackson to recuse herself from ruling on his motion for a new trial because she herself is biased: she praised the jurors for serving “with integrity under difficult circumstances.”
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Available as a free newsletter at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com
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The Russophobes ultimate game plan was and still is to reduce Russia to Balkanized rubble, the same way they did to the former Yugoslavia. A dammed clusterfuck of impoverished ethno-states, too busy stabbing each other in the back to pose any viable threat to Dollar dominance. Vladimir Putin threw a wrench into these plans after he was chosen to replace Yeltsin by the power brokers of the deep Kremlin, who feared the further empowerment of Gennady Zyugnov's dogged Communists who would have easily defeated the increasingly despised Yeltsin in '96 if it wasn't for Clinton's flagrant meddling in that years presidential elections. Putin was originally Yeltsin's protege but once at the helm he quickly proved to be nearly as threatening to the Federation's status quo as Zyugnov. Reigning in the oligarchs, making peace with the Chechnyans and, most damningly, standing up to American meddling in Georgia and Ukraine. Naturally, Putin became persona non grata. The Russophobes, who by now, ruled not only Washington and Wall Street, but the mass media too, aimed all their guns at the Russian strongman's chrome dome and set their phasers to kill.
Comrade Hermit, “War Of The Warlords” (February 28th 2017).
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the correlation between ‘lock her up’ chants and criminal behavior continues to strengthen
If you really can’t absorb any more of Trump’s Ukrainian caper, the broadest points to know about recent developments are probably:
There were quite a few legally inadvisable connections between Trump and Ukraine before he tried to shake down President Zelensky.
These contacts included several people who were just arrested on campaign finance violations, two of whom were supposedly part of Trump’s legal team.
It’s looking more and more likely that former NYC mayor and current CNN comic relief character Rudy Giuliani is going down.
I’m not going to predict which aspects of these developments are going to be important in the next few weeks, but there are enough connections to the impeachment investigation that it’s probably worth being able to follow the basics.
The central non-American figure is a Ukrainian “legitimate businessman” named Dmitry Firtash. Imagine if Tony Soprano was a Koch brother in hock with the Kremlin. When Paul Manafort’s old boss Viktor Yanukovych was the president of Ukraine, Firtash used his position at a Russian gas company to funnel money to pro-Russian politicians like Yanukovych. After Yanukovych fell, Firtash fled Ukraine to Vienna. The US has been trying to have him sent here for the past few years because *waves hands* lots of crimes.
These guys who were arrested earlier this month are closely connected with Firtash and Giuliani. Two of them were arrested at an airport, where they had one-way tickets to Vienna. They were busted for running a cartoonishly sketchy super PAC which funneled inappropriate contributions to a number of Republican politicians. A lot of that money came from the American oligarchs you expect to see pumping money into conservative campaigns – but remember, Firtash’s specialty is laundering rubles for pro-Kremlin politicians outside of Russia. One of them helpfully shared photos of himself with many of these new contacts on social media. This might be a rich dude doing a dumb thing for the ‘gram, though it would also be a perfectly good method of communication if, say, your boss was overseas and he wanted to know who might be open to bribes, and you couldn’t report directly him because he was almost certainly under surveillance. For example. (“Dmitri, if you’re listening...”)
These guys, again, are doing this shady stuff with Firtash while they are also on Donald Trump’s legal team. This is a distinction they share with the former mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani is right in the middle of the Ukrainian shakedown that’s getting Individual-1 impeached, and had been under both criminal and counterintelligence investigations for months when he – totally coincidentally, I’m sure – made plans to join his buddies on that trip to Vienna. He was part of the cover-up of Trump’s payoffs to his exes. He’s also deep into the misconduct in the FBI’s New York field office during the 2016 election. There’s more, but you get the idea.
Giuliani acts like just another Trump-adjacent crook. If that’s how you think of him, he deserves it. Unlike most other Trump-adjacent crooks, though, it is at least explicable why a lot of people got the wrong idea about him. Before being cast as Donald Trump’s TV “lawyer,” he was a shady businessman and Republican candidate for president in his own right. Before that, he was the mayor of New York City. And before that, he was the United States attorney at SDNY (that’s the chief federal prosecutor in Manhattan). Before that … he was presumably still a racist, authoritarian asshole, but in ways that are less relevant to the issue at hand.
Whether or not he was substantively good at those jobs, he had a knack for convincing politically moderate white people he was good at them. He ran the SDNY when the feds were rolling up the Italian mafia, and he was savvy about using arrests for PR. He happened to be the mayor in the 1990s as violent crime rates were falling all over the US, so people really did experience the city getting a lot safer during his term. The EPA probably deserved more credit than Rudy, but like, when you notice there are a lot fewer murders in your neighborhood, it’s natural to feel good about that and not care too much about why it’s happening. And, although he reverted to form soon afterward, he really did reassure the public in the hours and days after the 9/11 attacks. Which, yes, was literally his job, but the impression a person makes during a traumatic event can be hard to shake.
This doesn’t excuse what he’s up to now. If anything, it makes him look worse, since a former US attorney doesn’t have Junior’s defense of being too stupid to be a criminal. And it’s not to depict him as a tragic hero, because fuck him. We get our news from people, many of them New Yorkers, who tend to have filters and biases, and acknowledging those filters can give us a clearer picture of the information they give us. A lot of them have been genuinely thrown by Giuliani’s behavior, and not just because of the unearned generic white man credibility they’ve projected onto the more conventional Vichy Republicans.
Weirdly, Giuliani’s reputation might actually be part of why this story is sticking when so many haven’t. Trump being a crook is dog bites man. America’s Mayor turning out to be Saul Goodman? That’s entertainment.
It’s probably not totally irrelevant that Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign fell apart right around the time one of the Democratic contenders memorably savaged him for only ever wanting to say “a noun, a verb, and 9/11.” That was the senior senator from the great state of Delaware, a kindly-looking gentleman named Joe Biden. Biden’s anti-corruption work in Ukraine, unsurprisingly, messed things up for Firtash. That probably explains why Biden was the first of the 2020 Democrats to be targeted like this, but he won’t be the last. So next time you catch some jackass in your Facebook feed rambling on about “Kamala is a cop” or making fun of Elizabeth Warren’s Native American grandmother, just remember, that’s getting pushed by this band of geniuses. They don’t need your help.
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#BirtherInChief #CorpMedia #Idiocracy #Oligarchs #MegaBanks vs #Union #Occupy #NoDAPL #BLM #SDF #DACA #MeToo #Humanity
Statement from Syriac Christians in The Self-Administration Region of Northern And Eastern Syria (Democratic Federation Of Northern Syria)
https://www.facebook.com/Sutoro.S.S.F/posts/1154776091393007?__tn__=-R
The Union party and the women's Union (Union) held a press conference where a statement of media and public opinion was read by the joint chairman of the union party, Mr. We with, which read: More than eight years ago of the war in Syria brought with it the scourge and deep wounds of all the Syrian people and the control of ISIS and other terrorist groups for years in large areas of Syria caused the extermination and displacement of a large proportion of our people in Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces, which represents all the peoples of the region and in cooperation with the international alliance, managed to eliminate the terrorist organization and remove this great threat that was threatening our existence and our lives, but the fears are renewed again with the rise of the danger of ISIS, which is the Turkish State It brings back to our historical raj that we lived as the people of will shuri over a hundred years ago and the war of genocide towards the people of the Syriac, all Danny by the Ottoman and Turkey today, the justice and development party is doing a war of extermination Ethnic and Religious against the peoples of northern and eastern Syria, including our people, Syriac and Christians in general, turkey supports and rely on terrorist extremist groups in their occupation of many Syrian areas such as Idlib, Afrin, Azaz, Jarabulus, Bab and on the ninth date From the current month, she started her campaign against the head of the eye and a white hill and took control of it after the massacres against civilians, the use of internationally forbidden weapons and the displacement of the peoples that existed where there was no me, Armenian, Kurdish or Kurdish Only Jihadists are associated with Turkey and this hard-minded thought. Our people Syriac and the rest on this earth can not stand any longer in such situations and this war and this great support provided to terrorists by Turkey and that any continuation of this Turkish aggression is a real threat to the continued existence and survival of the pan Christians in The regions of north and eastern Syria and history is repeating itself and from the same actor in genocide against our people, Erdogan deceived the world through his statements which he shows that he is supportive of the minority and protect them but his intention and the idea of fundamentalist is against all the National and religious components Different from him and the Turkish State and through all its policies contributed to the displacement of our people from it and there are only several thousand left in turkey, and today after the recent aggression, the city of Ras al Ain and white hill fled all and this fate will be for all the cities and villages in which he lives if we do not get rid of this regime and its agents and mercenaries of the chauvinist, in the Turkish City of Konya with the wide support of the reply, posts were paste on all places The public is incitement against Christians and Jews as well as at the saffron monastery in Turkey, which was previously a headquarters of the Orthodox Church before the Turks forced them to leave Turkish territory and move the way chair to Syria last Sunday the Turkish regime forced Christian religious men In this monastery, we pray for the support of the Turkish Army and the groups fighting with it in their war against the people of northern and eastern Syria. This is all the danger of this regime on the whole components as well as global peace and security.
The Russian initiative, which led to the Sochi agreement with the Turkish side, LED to a change of the wheel and forced Turkey to stop its war against us and stop Turkish ambitions to occupy more Syrian territory and dedicate this step to peace and tranquility to the peoples of the region and we in turn We highly appreciate these Russian efforts to reach that convention, but with our challenge to the item dedicated to the Turkish occupation and its mercenaries in the city of Ras al Ain and tel white and the area between them and all the areas they occupy, there can be no safe return of civilians to their cities with the presence of this occupation and its mercenaries and thus pave the way for the Turkish regime by applying its plan in the population change of the region where for our part we confirm that no one can return Syriac or Armenian in The presence of these mercenaries has been a natural result, and this is a natural result when any agreements between the great powers and regional states take place without the participation and the opinion of the peoples of the region, including our people, and therefore we can avoid any disaster that could happen. At the union party, we call on the international community and the United Nations to withdraw the Turkish Army from all Syrian regions and to open an investigation into the crimes committed during the recent aggression on Ras al Ain and white hill which are considered war crimes, crimes against humanity and accounting The Turkish regime is the first responsibility for it and we stress once again that the only solution to stop all wars and tragedies against the Syrian people is by heading to the political solution and the development of a new constitution in Syria that is the guarantee of all rights and freedoms including the rights of our people We will not accept any marginalization or exclusion, which will be harmful to us as a new extermination, and we in turn have been and continue to support the path of political solution across the United Nations, but the composition of the constitutional commission we consider it a puppet, without Political forces represented through the self-Administration of northern and eastern Syria and there cannot be a lasting solution with this unnecessary exclusion. We also consider the achievements that have been achieved in previous years for the peoples of the northern and eastern Syria regions of the democratic self-management project, thanks to the sacrifices of the sons and daughters of the people of Kurd, Arabs, Armenian, Turkmen and Yazidis It is why any future solution to Syria must be built on this basis and on this essence, which is dedicated to the recognition of the other and the promotion of the common living of all Syrian components and recognizes their legitimate rights and we are in front of great responsibilities and we assure For our people, our struggle continues to establish our rights and achieve peace and stability in our region and our country Syria and our people must shoulder their responsibilities in these difficult and historic circumstances, which require the unity of all our efforts in order to survive and Secure a decent life for our future and for refugees by ensuring their full rights. We also thank all those who stood with us in our resistance and our response to Turkish aggression from all the world peoples, governments, institutions and their attitudes that have also had an impact to stop this aggression and stop new massacres against all our peoples. Mercy and eternity to the holy martyrs and speedy recovery to the wounded Syriac Union Party Syria Qamishli 23/10/2019
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