"For I and you" - meaning the US inhabitants - it does plenty. You are not being killed or maimed, you are not starving, you keep building, repairing, etc. You keep creating while those others are destroying. Double-whammy.
Most people do not believe in afterlife. They think they die and become "worm food" in the words of Ricky Gervais' character from Extras.
Being reckless as humans tend to be they think the situation holds while they're alive. And when it's time for "coming around" it'll be someone else on the receiving end.
Good for you. What are you worried about then? What does it matter if anyone lives or not? If there's earth or universe or anything at all? When you're gone, you're gone. For you nothing existed before you were born, and nothing will after you're gone. Same for everybody else according to you. The believers are mistaken, they're delusional. For them nothing is out there either.
Jeez, maybe because we atheists realise that we only have one life, this is it, let's make the best of it while we can.
If some idiot with a holy book does something good, great, but they're also likely to do something really horrible and evil and either think that it's ok because of their religion or that they'll be forgiven by their invisible friend.
An atheist's moral is based on what's best for the most of us. A religious person's moral is based on weird rules in (usually) a really old book that in the end is all about scoring points in 'heaven'.
That, in my opinion, is a very narrow minded perspective, (to think that we are nothing more than worm food.)
But somehow, I don't think we're going to have to wait all the way until the afterlife for this one to come back to bite us.
Nevertheless, if we were to stop for a moment and consider the degree of our complicity in all this, repentance would most definitely be in order, first of all, and then perhaps, civil disobedience.
Believing in any mythical construct is pure idiocy. All of it can be traced back to old dead men making up an instrumental lie so that people would serve them.
Religion can be considered just one of such constructs. There are many that atheists believe in and serve the same purpose if one chooses to reduce it this way.
You can't really blame the atheists. They've been led down the garden path for so long into nihilism. There's no place for religious beliefs to land in them anymore.
In my experience, there's only one effective way to deal with atheism:
Gods are just artifacts of value judgment. They aren't necessary, even if they did exist. All religion is best dismissed as a generated defense of slavery.
That's a pure misunderstanding as I understand it. The God (or the notion, if one prefers) is there not to do stuff for one, but help one do the right thing. If one is seeking such help. But no one is obligated to.
Many cults - especially the proselytizing type - simplify (bastardize) things to just get people in.
It is not the U.S. citizens (other than the ruling classes) that is responsible for any of this. Plenty of U.S. citizens are dying of treatable diseases because we lack free health care. Plenty of Americans are starving. Nobody is maintaining the American infrastructure which is collapsing all around us. Nothing gets repaired because the corporations don't want to spend any money on repairs. The United States is the greatest destroyer in the world. Your comment is a fairy tale.
You are not wrong but neither are you right. Have you ever tried to get an American to understand this war? I believe a majority support it. Yes they have been scammed but they want to be scammed. Otherwise the perennial “USA USA USA” chants would have been silenced long ago.
It's true. For the most part, we have been so thoroughly brainwashed for so long that the faculty of critical thinking is atrophied in us, if not entirely missing.
It takes a great deal of effort to free oneself from the degree of mind control that we have been subjected to.
Many don't realize they are controlled, and if some of those learned they wouldn't care. They'd only "wake up" if stuff got too uncomfortable for them. Like reestablished draft, or bombs instead of hurricanes doing the destruction.
Speaking of 'fairy tales', have you ever read any? Read "The Tempest" by William Shakespeare? Seen the movie, 'Forbidden Planet'?
It's interesting how what is known as the 'Perennial Philosophy' keeps emerging in one way or another in popular culture throughout history.
Perhaps it is nothing more than 'escapism'. But perhaps, it is something deeper than that, trying to tell us something, if only by analogy...
Ever seen a movie called, 'The Matrix'?
The life that we have become familiar with, the only life we know, may just not be exactly what we think it is...there very well may turn out to be much more to life than meets the eye.
You don't necessarily have to vote for the Capitalist Pigs. All you have to do is buy what they have to sell you in order to encourage and empower them to continue with what they are doing.
Well, actually, for those of us inhabitants with peaceful ideals and who are forced to pay for the adventures of US MIC in multiple ways, it does hurt as we suffer poor health care, mediocre education, crappy public works, vast inequality.
There's no argument there. But for your rulers you'd "hurt" a lot more if there were healthy examples of alternative ways of progressing elsewhere in the world. To them all these expenditures for destruction elsewhere are ultimately for your "benefit". You effectively rise by pushing everyone else down.
Essentially you’re arguing that it’s all cool so long as someone else, anyone but Americans, pays the price. We mustn’t disturb American blissful ignorance.
From what I read and hear on this side of the pond many Americans are dying because they are refused affordable health care and medicines - so effectively, being killed by your own Govt, many live on or below the poverty line and are unable to afford proper nutrition so are starving slowly and not much building or repairing of public infrastructure seems to be happening.
So what is America creating other that the machinery of mass murder and death and instruments to cling to a fantasy of global rule and power.
That is an excellent qualification. Note however, that part of the problem is that there are millions of people who do depend on defense spending, many including PMC middle class people and working class people making these weapons (in addition to the oligarchs and swamp lobbyists and think tankers). So the globalist benefit, but there are also alot of middle class and even working class Americans getting their bread and butter from the Ukraine money printing spending.
They obviously are not Buddhist concerned about something called, 'Right livelihood'. Or Hindu's who understand the way 'Karma' works. Or even myself who, as much as almost four years ago now, suggested to my wife that we ought to invest in the 'Defense Industry' because we're undoubtedly going to be at war with Russia soon, who, Bless her heart, told me that we couldn't do that because it would be unethical.
The problem is that most corporations have their hands dirty. Food industry is poisoning the world with sugar, seed oils, salt & they know it. Pharma avoids cures in favor of chemical dependency, also poisoning us. Oil & gas cares nothing about environmental impacts. Big Tech is poisoning our minds. Maybe there is a sector worth investing in but I’m feeling a bit negative today...
Got me to thinking how many people are involved in the military-industrial complex in my own family, going no further out than siblings and first cousins.
This is just one aspect of the so-called Deep State. Its tentacles are everywhere.
Do the Ukrainian men being fed into the meat grinder realize that their sacrifice is for Senators Karen, Lindsey, and Da Nang Dick as well as Vicky Nuland?
Significant number think they're for Ukraine and against Russia. Protecting freedoms. Thoroughly brainwashed to the point of no return, really. That it's also for the USA only pumps them up.
The rest are drafted and forced into it. They can do next to nothing. Surrendering is not that easy. SS and Gestapo are aware and making sure it doesn't happen.
And think about all those KIA - fathers, brothers, sons. Nothing can change that - it will keep this anti-Russian sentiment for a long time. It is really no win situation.
Just look at how Japanese and Germans are enjoying licking the US' ass. How they admire sucking its cock. How they keep asking whether it's high enough they're jumping even when told to just jump.
Civil wars end too, and the healing comes. The most important thing is to keep records, present all of them - and I mean all (and they are being gathered) - have thorough public investigations and trials, allow the rest of the world to see it all. The west should not matter - it proved utterly unreliable, completely untrustworthy in every possible respect.
Most importantly - never let it be forgotten again. Hitlerism was never forgotten or eradicated. Instead it was saved, nurtured, and allowed to flourish for the aims that were not accomplished at the time. Churchill was itching to do it right then - look up "Unthinkable". As long as the memory is allowed to get blank, this will keep repeating.
I agree with the second and third point. Absolutely! As for the first, refraining to engage with your body metaphors 🫣, would not answer also be - there is a difference between governments’ actions and people’s understanding what is going on? But then again, as Caitlin is discussing in her pages, there is also a blanket propaganda, which is a sad part of the present condition.
I used those metaphors intentionally and I would use worse if I knew of any. The problem is not just governments there. Regular people as well. Not all, of course, but significant number. I'd venture a majority.
There is a hard core of Ukrainian nazis, but most Ukrainians are either press-ganged, or think that this war is their admission to the Golden Billion, The Magical Land Where Institutions Basically Work.
While I'm not expert in geopolitics, I seem to have missed Putin threatening the US... It seems to me that he simply wants to be left to govern and protect his country and people in peace ...
Read "Overthrow" by Stephen Kinzer. Many overthrows indeed took place because the new governments wanted to be on their own and improve their countries independently of the USA. Many adopted the principle of "All men are created equal" etc. They found out soon that the principle applied only to the USA.
The principle has never applied to the USA except as an ideal. Inequality is rife in the USA and has been since the earliest British, Dutch, French and Spanish colonialists landed in the so-called "New World".
I should have added "according to them". The whole thing is pretty much a lie but it's been working not just for the rest of the world but for the majority in the US as well.
Curtis, you certainly are no expert in geopolitics. To view the criminal Putin as a man who simply wants to be left to govern ignores his inspired devolution to neofascism in Russia. He has more than choked all dissent and his FSB has more assassinations to its credit than any other intelligence operatives in the world with the possible exception of the CIA. This peaceful guy you laud is seeking the elimination of all LGBT people, all political dissidents, all anti-war protesters and hides behind the robes of the ultraconservative Russian Orthodox Church in preaching the revival of the Russian Empire.
Your description of Putins Russia sounds remarkably like what the US has devolved to. Other than the fact that the US has a far greater military budget than Putins.
Next you'll be telling us we have "anger management problems". Our Nazis are far superior to Putins Nazis. And we have the fundamentalist Christian churches instead of the Russian Orthodox church. Much better.
"...without any diversion or misappropriation of American aid.”
Hahahahahahaha!!! I just couldn't stop laughing at that line. As if the missing trillions from the "Defense" budget had never happened... As if Zelensky and his fellow money launderers hadn't appropriated something like $400 million for themselves to purchase mansions around the globe.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave when we endeavor to deceive!
When I try to tell people here in the US about Zelensky's mansions they laugh in my face. Also none of them know anything about Ukraine and the 2014 coup, broken peace deals, hell they never heard of Victoria Nuland! And these people view themselves as "smart" cause they listen to NPR and read the NY Times!! Oh and most never heard of Substack, where in IMO THE best journalists reside.
Of the many columns Caitlin has written indicting the DC terrorism leaders, this one ought to be airdropped into Ukraine. The unabashed, cavalier contempt for the loss of life that these functionaries proudly flaunt is nauseating.
And while they bask in their ignorance, Russian diplomats are working overtime to point out that the constant ramping up of the delivery of weaponry, foreign mercenaries, staged border provocations is piling up the corpses of the very people they purport to care for.
The fact is that this despicable, fraudulent posturing intended to pass for responsible governance is a comment on their opinion of the voters. How many Americans are going to endorse this shit show? I think of the histrionic, staged rage of the Tea Party, and then I recall the impassioned anger of the ant-war protesters in 1968, and look how far unabated propaganda can take a submissive culture in less than 3 generations.
It needs to be airdropped in Sweden too, or mandatory reading, to at least get a new perspective in, with all the censorship, blocking Internet to certain countries and a MSM that is totally corrupt here as well.
An online protest of the proxy war ought to be held live in every capital city of NATO member states. Do it on Rumble, link in TikTok, with music, artists, poetry and inspiring stories. Raise money to give real aid to Ukraine. The madness needs to be addressed by caring people, or else it will continue with no comment, only fabricated takes.
These sociopathic ghouls. Literally bragging about how they're getting good returns in blood, for the low, low cost of a million odd Ukrainians. May they all awaken in a Twilight Zone episode where they're transformed into a middle aged Ukie accountant, dragged from their job, given a few weeks training, being pushed across open fields into a maelstrom of Russian artillery. The ending would feature a Western military advisor commenting on the guy's body in a pile in the back of a truck that "Well, we think it's a real bargain, they aren't Americans, after all!"
It really is horrific, realizing these politicians seem to think it's a good thing that so many people are dying over there - because in their small minds, Russia and Putin is a greater evil - so all these people must lose their lives for the "greater good". And what's even sicker - is really, that's not what this is about - it's about corporate hegemony and the pipeline they blew up.
They're all pushing for more bloodshed - there is no serious attempt to resolve the issue without more killing. It really is a kind of Twilight Zone - where you and I have found ourselves in some kind of Nazi Regime of death - where mass murder has become the moral thing to do. An upside down world of human values and corrupt murderers in charge.
I know I keep repeating this, but try to place yourself in 1930-40s Germany. Being one of the few who saw things through. The whole West is now in that condition.
Yes but this time if they go through with it, the continuing non-stop escalation - nuclear war. Hearing Tucker Carlson say it was a hard pill to swallow - that he is convinced it will happen. Hard to wrap my mind around it - the sociopathic fools may actually do it - really cause perhaps the end of life as we know it - and create a mad max type of world.
So then again, what has life really been about? Can one derive any kind of meaning from it? What lies beyond our own mortality if anything?
Yes, we are heading there just as Hitler was back then had he gotten nuclear in time. And just as the US did as soon as it got it.
Today's crop are true descendants of all those MacArthur types and are just as itching to finish the job. I don't know why you seem to be so surprised.
Well - I think I'll be surprised at my own death, even though I know it's coming (eventually). Some part of me keeps thinking life will just keep going on and on.
This is what I’m shooting for Caitlin. I want to see them flaunt this attitude here. I want to see the face who calls for young Ukrainian men to the slaughter demand it of us. These fucks have no regards in the end. Everyone is expendable but them. However that is VERY unwise. Even dictators need a strong position in the population. You can almost see the pressure of a dream pulling them along. A failed dream of a gulag run by technofaggots in 2030 drive them over the rails.
I try not to get too hung up on blaming greed here. It’s not, not at this point. It’s survival that’s generating such strong actions by the GAE. I really do believe it’s roots are in London. It’s just America has become their warhorse (militarily and financially). Anyhow we are way past greed as being the reason for any of this. I think we have drifted off into the land of virtue. That’s what is making the gears turn.
Despite seeming to be long past its empire days, the UK does keep oddly appearing when we look deeper into many fishy goings on around the world.
Some examples range from the Trump-Russia smear campaign to some of the more terroristic type activities the Ukrainians have engaged in during the Ukraine War.
Its original roots are in London, maybe, but runners have taken root in New York, Washington (DC), Cambridge (MA), Cambridge (UK), Langley, and elsewhere. It could be that London was a cutting off of a plant that grew through Westphalia, Rome, Athens, and all the way back to just before Egypt's First Dynasty. It is a hell of a tough weed to pull.
Three things: This is basically an admission of a proxy war - I'd love to hear what the Ukrainians have to say for sacrificing their country and lives instead on behalf of the Americans and last but not least but the most pertinent - I would kill to hear what Putin has to say! He should go blow up a few things just to solidify just how weakened they truly are! Perhaps start with DC!
So far it's maybe $2 million per Russian death. At that rate all of Russia could be killed for a mere three hundred trillion dollars. Imagine the return on that investment. And all we've got to do is print the money.
At first, I thought that quote had to be satire. "Germany has weaned itself from dependence on Russian energy and, in many ways, rediscovered its sense of values." Germany, like a 2-yr-old still on the tit, needed to grow up and learn to freeze and starve like a big boy. Did it really wean itself by blowing up its own pipeline? And what is that sense of values? Obedience, subservience, groveling for LNG.
I was somewhat worried about the quotations which begin this article. I expect politicians and other bigdeals to lie. What is felt in reading those quotations was not the presence of lying but the presence of delusion. If what I read is even partially true, the war has not benefited the US and its satellites but rather done them rather serious damage. At some point in the future there will be a conflict with reality and the delusions will break down. Often, the response to such a development is a hysterical attempt to restore the delusions at any cost. "At any cost" in the case of the US could mean nuclear war, civil war, or a totalitarian coup. We are already observing desperate attempts to suppress the bad news from social media which is part of the process I'm imagining here. I am not at all sure how the political system will handle the collapse.
Agreed. There's a candor in those quotes and complete lack of awareness that people reading them will feel otherwise. Before, the propagandists knew what they were saying was a lie. Now US 'leaders' and those of the satellites believe what they're saying is true. It makes them both naive and dangerous, maybe more so than the liars.
But the Ukraine war was always designed, imo, to weaken the US military and bankrupt it financially. Who does that benefit? China if their Treasury Bills can be used to buy US real estate, especially the West Coast and Hawaii. Definitely one theory behind the fires.
And by China, I mean a handful of Chinese oligarchs. And then there are the oligarchs behind them. But the US politicians are pedo-puppets.
Gaslighting is an important part of normal Protestant childrearing. If you've ever wondered why their adults are so fucked in the head, well, there you go.
Caitlin's critical thinking is always timely. There is beauty in her truth telling. That the war was provoked is now obvious; that the build up to the provocation was in the US empire's rulebook for a long time is also obvious - Caitlin has gathered enough evidence of the gloating and the greed and the ruthlessness of the empire managers. They set about setting the scene, getting Nato and all of the vassal states and the propaganda machine blaring for a proxy war; cynically using Ukraine's people and its fascist elements. How could Russia have ignored the provocation - it was forced into a fight for its existence.The threat of being balkanised would have been enough. We are now passive onlookers in witnessing the diminishing of Russia, the aggressive attempts to isolate China; keep a cold war going to lead to a hot war.The empire's theatre of war is cluttered with white supremacy, racism, greed, hatred and delusion.
The cynicism of U.S. Senators is appalling. They are thrilled at the low cost of this war without mentioning the true cost, which is countless thousands of Ukrainian lives and the devastation of their country. And by the way, the claim that this war has cost Russia half their military equipment is agitprop. It’s the Ukrainians that are losing their hardware, at least half of which they’ve lost just in their failed spring offensive. That’s why we’ve had to send them more and more hardware. The Russians even wiped out the Ukrainian missile launching sites, all of it in little more than a day.
It's not appalling. We should all be so cynical so that we don't waste time on useless dreams and dramas, and instead create a world of rich material sufficiency where other people's private delusions need not be of any importance to anyone else.
By, 'US interests' I suppose they must mean 'Globalist multinational corporate interests', because it ain't doing a thing for you and I!
"For I and you" - meaning the US inhabitants - it does plenty. You are not being killed or maimed, you are not starving, you keep building, repairing, etc. You keep creating while those others are destroying. Double-whammy.
Yes. But, 'What goes around, comes around' and I'm sure that all of this will catch up with us sooner or later.
Most people do not believe in afterlife. They think they die and become "worm food" in the words of Ricky Gervais' character from Extras.
Being reckless as humans tend to be they think the situation holds while they're alive. And when it's time for "coming around" it'll be someone else on the receiving end.
I don't believe in an afterlife. I am an atheist. Religion is superstition, nothing more.
Good for you. What are you worried about then? What does it matter if anyone lives or not? If there's earth or universe or anything at all? When you're gone, you're gone. For you nothing existed before you were born, and nothing will after you're gone. Same for everybody else according to you. The believers are mistaken, they're delusional. For them nothing is out there either.
Why worry then?
Jeez, maybe because we atheists realise that we only have one life, this is it, let's make the best of it while we can.
If some idiot with a holy book does something good, great, but they're also likely to do something really horrible and evil and either think that it's ok because of their religion or that they'll be forgiven by their invisible friend.
An atheist's moral is based on what's best for the most of us. A religious person's moral is based on weird rules in (usually) a really old book that in the end is all about scoring points in 'heaven'.
I could go on for hours...
That, in my opinion, is a very narrow minded perspective, (to think that we are nothing more than worm food.)
But somehow, I don't think we're going to have to wait all the way until the afterlife for this one to come back to bite us.
Nevertheless, if we were to stop for a moment and consider the degree of our complicity in all this, repentance would most definitely be in order, first of all, and then perhaps, civil disobedience.
"We" are not complicit unless we voted for the capitalist criminals. I did not vote for any of them. The ruling classes are responsible for all of it.
Whether or not there is an afterlife, imperialism comes home to roost and has been doing that for awhile.
Believing in any mythical construct is pure idiocy. All of it can be traced back to old dead men making up an instrumental lie so that people would serve them.
Religion can be considered just one of such constructs. There are many that atheists believe in and serve the same purpose if one chooses to reduce it this way.
You can't really blame the atheists. They've been led down the garden path for so long into nihilism. There's no place for religious beliefs to land in them anymore.
In my experience, there's only one effective way to deal with atheism:
https://youtu.be/YnNSnJbjdws?feature=shared
But what about the real thing?
How are we supposed to deal with that!
Gods are just artifacts of value judgment. They aren't necessary, even if they did exist. All religion is best dismissed as a generated defense of slavery.
He was most likely thinking about MORE TAXES!
as it turns out 'god' seems pretty irrelevant. "if there really was a god here, he would have raised a hand by now ...".
That's a pure misunderstanding as I understand it. The God (or the notion, if one prefers) is there not to do stuff for one, but help one do the right thing. If one is seeking such help. But no one is obligated to.
Many cults - especially the proselytizing type - simplify (bastardize) things to just get people in.
well, this 'helping believers to do the right thing' isn't really working, afaik.
It is not the U.S. citizens (other than the ruling classes) that is responsible for any of this. Plenty of U.S. citizens are dying of treatable diseases because we lack free health care. Plenty of Americans are starving. Nobody is maintaining the American infrastructure which is collapsing all around us. Nothing gets repaired because the corporations don't want to spend any money on repairs. The United States is the greatest destroyer in the world. Your comment is a fairy tale.
You are not wrong but neither are you right. Have you ever tried to get an American to understand this war? I believe a majority support it. Yes they have been scammed but they want to be scammed. Otherwise the perennial “USA USA USA” chants would have been silenced long ago.
It's true. For the most part, we have been so thoroughly brainwashed for so long that the faculty of critical thinking is atrophied in us, if not entirely missing.
It takes a great deal of effort to free oneself from the degree of mind control that we have been subjected to.
Many don't realize they are controlled, and if some of those learned they wouldn't care. They'd only "wake up" if stuff got too uncomfortable for them. Like reestablished draft, or bombs instead of hurricanes doing the destruction.
Speaking of 'fairy tales', have you ever read any? Read "The Tempest" by William Shakespeare? Seen the movie, 'Forbidden Planet'?
It's interesting how what is known as the 'Perennial Philosophy' keeps emerging in one way or another in popular culture throughout history.
Perhaps it is nothing more than 'escapism'. But perhaps, it is something deeper than that, trying to tell us something, if only by analogy...
Ever seen a movie called, 'The Matrix'?
The life that we have become familiar with, the only life we know, may just not be exactly what we think it is...there very well may turn out to be much more to life than meets the eye.
https://youtu.be/anlz3EuuhWo?feature=shared
I did not say "responsible", even though they are, even if implicitly, by endorsing the system where they think they matter.
I said they *benefit* from wars and turmoil and destruction elsewhere in the world.
Do you pay your taxes?
Buy things on Amazon or Costco?
Put gas in your car?
You don't necessarily have to vote for the Capitalist Pigs. All you have to do is buy what they have to sell you in order to encourage and empower them to continue with what they are doing.
What choice to they, or you, have? Individualists trooping to Amazon and Costco.
Caught in a trap! I can't walk out. Because I love you too much baby...
Well, actually, for those of us inhabitants with peaceful ideals and who are forced to pay for the adventures of US MIC in multiple ways, it does hurt as we suffer poor health care, mediocre education, crappy public works, vast inequality.
There's no argument there. But for your rulers you'd "hurt" a lot more if there were healthy examples of alternative ways of progressing elsewhere in the world. To them all these expenditures for destruction elsewhere are ultimately for your "benefit". You effectively rise by pushing everyone else down.
"Building, repairing"
The Broken Window Fallacy. Good for the glass makers and installers. The rest of us, not so much.
Next time you're out and about and see road work being done, buildings go up, etc., note those were not destroyed by bombs.
Essentially you’re arguing that it’s all cool so long as someone else, anyone but Americans, pays the price. We mustn’t disturb American blissful ignorance.
I don't have to argue anything. They say it themselves. The Caitlin's post is about that.
From what I read and hear on this side of the pond many Americans are dying because they are refused affordable health care and medicines - so effectively, being killed by your own Govt, many live on or below the poverty line and are unable to afford proper nutrition so are starving slowly and not much building or repairing of public infrastructure seems to be happening.
So what is America creating other that the machinery of mass murder and death and instruments to cling to a fantasy of global rule and power.
Nah, nothing is being "Created" here but an open-air prison and a prison guard middle class to run it.
That is an excellent qualification. Note however, that part of the problem is that there are millions of people who do depend on defense spending, many including PMC middle class people and working class people making these weapons (in addition to the oligarchs and swamp lobbyists and think tankers). So the globalist benefit, but there are also alot of middle class and even working class Americans getting their bread and butter from the Ukraine money printing spending.
They obviously are not Buddhist concerned about something called, 'Right livelihood'. Or Hindu's who understand the way 'Karma' works. Or even myself who, as much as almost four years ago now, suggested to my wife that we ought to invest in the 'Defense Industry' because we're undoubtedly going to be at war with Russia soon, who, Bless her heart, told me that we couldn't do that because it would be unethical.
Well, your wife has now made two people feel okay about missing out on investing in the "defense" industry. Thanks for sharing.
The problem is that most corporations have their hands dirty. Food industry is poisoning the world with sugar, seed oils, salt & they know it. Pharma avoids cures in favor of chemical dependency, also poisoning us. Oil & gas cares nothing about environmental impacts. Big Tech is poisoning our minds. Maybe there is a sector worth investing in but I’m feeling a bit negative today...
And yours is an excellent point, too.
Got me to thinking how many people are involved in the military-industrial complex in my own family, going no further out than siblings and first cousins.
This is just one aspect of the so-called Deep State. Its tentacles are everywhere.
They mean the interests of property owners, namely the ability to keep the rabble off the means of production.
How many millions of USofT inhabitants also make MONEY - directly or indirectly - from the MIC?!
Do the Ukrainian men being fed into the meat grinder realize that their sacrifice is for Senators Karen, Lindsey, and Da Nang Dick as well as Vicky Nuland?
Significant number think they're for Ukraine and against Russia. Protecting freedoms. Thoroughly brainwashed to the point of no return, really. That it's also for the USA only pumps them up.
The rest are drafted and forced into it. They can do next to nothing. Surrendering is not that easy. SS and Gestapo are aware and making sure it doesn't happen.
And think about all those KIA - fathers, brothers, sons. Nothing can change that - it will keep this anti-Russian sentiment for a long time. It is really no win situation.
The Russians were far more heavy handed in Chechnya. A generation later, Chechens volunteer for the Russian Army as city-breakers.
YES! There is always hope.
Just look at how Japanese and Germans are enjoying licking the US' ass. How they admire sucking its cock. How they keep asking whether it's high enough they're jumping even when told to just jump.
Civil wars end too, and the healing comes. The most important thing is to keep records, present all of them - and I mean all (and they are being gathered) - have thorough public investigations and trials, allow the rest of the world to see it all. The west should not matter - it proved utterly unreliable, completely untrustworthy in every possible respect.
Most importantly - never let it be forgotten again. Hitlerism was never forgotten or eradicated. Instead it was saved, nurtured, and allowed to flourish for the aims that were not accomplished at the time. Churchill was itching to do it right then - look up "Unthinkable". As long as the memory is allowed to get blank, this will keep repeating.
I agree with the second and third point. Absolutely! As for the first, refraining to engage with your body metaphors 🫣, would not answer also be - there is a difference between governments’ actions and people’s understanding what is going on? But then again, as Caitlin is discussing in her pages, there is also a blanket propaganda, which is a sad part of the present condition.
I used those metaphors intentionally and I would use worse if I knew of any. The problem is not just governments there. Regular people as well. Not all, of course, but significant number. I'd venture a majority.
And that's what enables the governments.
There is a hard core of Ukrainian nazis, but most Ukrainians are either press-ganged, or think that this war is their admission to the Golden Billion, The Magical Land Where Institutions Basically Work.
A generation of Ukrainian men is being wiped out. Contempt is too weak a word for how I feel about those that support this war.
Ukraine: a money laundering auction economy sold to the highest Biden.
I see what you did there. Good one!
While I'm not expert in geopolitics, I seem to have missed Putin threatening the US... It seems to me that he simply wants to be left to govern and protect his country and people in peace ...
And that is the threat.
Read "Overthrow" by Stephen Kinzer. Many overthrows indeed took place because the new governments wanted to be on their own and improve their countries independently of the USA. Many adopted the principle of "All men are created equal" etc. They found out soon that the principle applied only to the USA.
The principle has never applied to the USA except as an ideal. Inequality is rife in the USA and has been since the earliest British, Dutch, French and Spanish colonialists landed in the so-called "New World".
I should have added "according to them". The whole thing is pretty much a lie but it's been working not just for the rest of the world but for the majority in the US as well.
Curtis, you certainly are no expert in geopolitics. To view the criminal Putin as a man who simply wants to be left to govern ignores his inspired devolution to neofascism in Russia. He has more than choked all dissent and his FSB has more assassinations to its credit than any other intelligence operatives in the world with the possible exception of the CIA. This peaceful guy you laud is seeking the elimination of all LGBT people, all political dissidents, all anti-war protesters and hides behind the robes of the ultraconservative Russian Orthodox Church in preaching the revival of the Russian Empire.
I don't see how that's our problem. Is he trying to invade the US?
Dr Schwartz
Your description of Putins Russia sounds remarkably like what the US has devolved to. Other than the fact that the US has a far greater military budget than Putins.
Next you'll be telling us we have "anger management problems". Our Nazis are far superior to Putins Nazis. And we have the fundamentalist Christian churches instead of the Russian Orthodox church. Much better.
Kool-Aid overdone.
I wish they would come shut you and your whiny Puritan farting the fuck up.
"...without any diversion or misappropriation of American aid.”
Hahahahahahaha!!! I just couldn't stop laughing at that line. As if the missing trillions from the "Defense" budget had never happened... As if Zelensky and his fellow money launderers hadn't appropriated something like $400 million for themselves to purchase mansions around the globe.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave when we endeavor to deceive!
When I try to tell people here in the US about Zelensky's mansions they laugh in my face. Also none of them know anything about Ukraine and the 2014 coup, broken peace deals, hell they never heard of Victoria Nuland! And these people view themselves as "smart" cause they listen to NPR and read the NY Times!! Oh and most never heard of Substack, where in IMO THE best journalists reside.
Of the many columns Caitlin has written indicting the DC terrorism leaders, this one ought to be airdropped into Ukraine. The unabashed, cavalier contempt for the loss of life that these functionaries proudly flaunt is nauseating.
And while they bask in their ignorance, Russian diplomats are working overtime to point out that the constant ramping up of the delivery of weaponry, foreign mercenaries, staged border provocations is piling up the corpses of the very people they purport to care for.
The fact is that this despicable, fraudulent posturing intended to pass for responsible governance is a comment on their opinion of the voters. How many Americans are going to endorse this shit show? I think of the histrionic, staged rage of the Tea Party, and then I recall the impassioned anger of the ant-war protesters in 1968, and look how far unabated propaganda can take a submissive culture in less than 3 generations.
It needs to be airdropped in Sweden too, or mandatory reading, to at least get a new perspective in, with all the censorship, blocking Internet to certain countries and a MSM that is totally corrupt here as well.
Oh well, at least I try with my translations.
An online protest of the proxy war ought to be held live in every capital city of NATO member states. Do it on Rumble, link in TikTok, with music, artists, poetry and inspiring stories. Raise money to give real aid to Ukraine. The madness needs to be addressed by caring people, or else it will continue with no comment, only fabricated takes.
"Raise money to give real aid to Ukraine. " They'd get you for that.
These sociopathic ghouls. Literally bragging about how they're getting good returns in blood, for the low, low cost of a million odd Ukrainians. May they all awaken in a Twilight Zone episode where they're transformed into a middle aged Ukie accountant, dragged from their job, given a few weeks training, being pushed across open fields into a maelstrom of Russian artillery. The ending would feature a Western military advisor commenting on the guy's body in a pile in the back of a truck that "Well, we think it's a real bargain, they aren't Americans, after all!"
It really is horrific, realizing these politicians seem to think it's a good thing that so many people are dying over there - because in their small minds, Russia and Putin is a greater evil - so all these people must lose their lives for the "greater good". And what's even sicker - is really, that's not what this is about - it's about corporate hegemony and the pipeline they blew up.
They're all pushing for more bloodshed - there is no serious attempt to resolve the issue without more killing. It really is a kind of Twilight Zone - where you and I have found ourselves in some kind of Nazi Regime of death - where mass murder has become the moral thing to do. An upside down world of human values and corrupt murderers in charge.
I know I keep repeating this, but try to place yourself in 1930-40s Germany. Being one of the few who saw things through. The whole West is now in that condition.
Yes but this time if they go through with it, the continuing non-stop escalation - nuclear war. Hearing Tucker Carlson say it was a hard pill to swallow - that he is convinced it will happen. Hard to wrap my mind around it - the sociopathic fools may actually do it - really cause perhaps the end of life as we know it - and create a mad max type of world.
So then again, what has life really been about? Can one derive any kind of meaning from it? What lies beyond our own mortality if anything?
Yes, we are heading there just as Hitler was back then had he gotten nuclear in time. And just as the US did as soon as it got it.
Today's crop are true descendants of all those MacArthur types and are just as itching to finish the job. I don't know why you seem to be so surprised.
Well - I think I'll be surprised at my own death, even though I know it's coming (eventually). Some part of me keeps thinking life will just keep going on and on.
Well said!
This is what I’m shooting for Caitlin. I want to see them flaunt this attitude here. I want to see the face who calls for young Ukrainian men to the slaughter demand it of us. These fucks have no regards in the end. Everyone is expendable but them. However that is VERY unwise. Even dictators need a strong position in the population. You can almost see the pressure of a dream pulling them along. A failed dream of a gulag run by technofaggots in 2030 drive them over the rails.
I try not to get too hung up on blaming greed here. It’s not, not at this point. It’s survival that’s generating such strong actions by the GAE. I really do believe it’s roots are in London. It’s just America has become their warhorse (militarily and financially). Anyhow we are way past greed as being the reason for any of this. I think we have drifted off into the land of virtue. That’s what is making the gears turn.
Despite seeming to be long past its empire days, the UK does keep oddly appearing when we look deeper into many fishy goings on around the world.
Some examples range from the Trump-Russia smear campaign to some of the more terroristic type activities the Ukrainians have engaged in during the Ukraine War.
Its original roots are in London, maybe, but runners have taken root in New York, Washington (DC), Cambridge (MA), Cambridge (UK), Langley, and elsewhere. It could be that London was a cutting off of a plant that grew through Westphalia, Rome, Athens, and all the way back to just before Egypt's First Dynasty. It is a hell of a tough weed to pull.
Three things: This is basically an admission of a proxy war - I'd love to hear what the Ukrainians have to say for sacrificing their country and lives instead on behalf of the Americans and last but not least but the most pertinent - I would kill to hear what Putin has to say! He should go blow up a few things just to solidify just how weakened they truly are! Perhaps start with DC!
So far it's maybe $2 million per Russian death. At that rate all of Russia could be killed for a mere three hundred trillion dollars. Imagine the return on that investment. And all we've got to do is print the money.
It's "perpetually war-horny senator" for me 🤣🤣
At first, I thought that quote had to be satire. "Germany has weaned itself from dependence on Russian energy and, in many ways, rediscovered its sense of values." Germany, like a 2-yr-old still on the tit, needed to grow up and learn to freeze and starve like a big boy. Did it really wean itself by blowing up its own pipeline? And what is that sense of values? Obedience, subservience, groveling for LNG.
"They call it sabotage. We call it rediscovery of values."
I was somewhat worried about the quotations which begin this article. I expect politicians and other bigdeals to lie. What is felt in reading those quotations was not the presence of lying but the presence of delusion. If what I read is even partially true, the war has not benefited the US and its satellites but rather done them rather serious damage. At some point in the future there will be a conflict with reality and the delusions will break down. Often, the response to such a development is a hysterical attempt to restore the delusions at any cost. "At any cost" in the case of the US could mean nuclear war, civil war, or a totalitarian coup. We are already observing desperate attempts to suppress the bad news from social media which is part of the process I'm imagining here. I am not at all sure how the political system will handle the collapse.
Agreed. There's a candor in those quotes and complete lack of awareness that people reading them will feel otherwise. Before, the propagandists knew what they were saying was a lie. Now US 'leaders' and those of the satellites believe what they're saying is true. It makes them both naive and dangerous, maybe more so than the liars.
But the Ukraine war was always designed, imo, to weaken the US military and bankrupt it financially. Who does that benefit? China if their Treasury Bills can be used to buy US real estate, especially the West Coast and Hawaii. Definitely one theory behind the fires.
And by China, I mean a handful of Chinese oligarchs. And then there are the oligarchs behind them. But the US politicians are pedo-puppets.
Gaslighting is an important part of normal Protestant childrearing. If you've ever wondered why their adults are so fucked in the head, well, there you go.
Senator Blumenthal, like the rest of Senators and congressmen, does not serve the American public.
He serves a tiny handful of ultrarich oligarchs and a cult of pathologically hateful, nihilistic neocons.
For them this is money well spent to own Ukraine, and for the neocon jihafists well they would be happy to spark nuclear Armageddon.
Caitlin's critical thinking is always timely. There is beauty in her truth telling. That the war was provoked is now obvious; that the build up to the provocation was in the US empire's rulebook for a long time is also obvious - Caitlin has gathered enough evidence of the gloating and the greed and the ruthlessness of the empire managers. They set about setting the scene, getting Nato and all of the vassal states and the propaganda machine blaring for a proxy war; cynically using Ukraine's people and its fascist elements. How could Russia have ignored the provocation - it was forced into a fight for its existence.The threat of being balkanised would have been enough. We are now passive onlookers in witnessing the diminishing of Russia, the aggressive attempts to isolate China; keep a cold war going to lead to a hot war.The empire's theatre of war is cluttered with white supremacy, racism, greed, hatred and delusion.
The cynicism of U.S. Senators is appalling. They are thrilled at the low cost of this war without mentioning the true cost, which is countless thousands of Ukrainian lives and the devastation of their country. And by the way, the claim that this war has cost Russia half their military equipment is agitprop. It’s the Ukrainians that are losing their hardware, at least half of which they’ve lost just in their failed spring offensive. That’s why we’ve had to send them more and more hardware. The Russians even wiped out the Ukrainian missile launching sites, all of it in little more than a day.
It's not appalling. We should all be so cynical so that we don't waste time on useless dreams and dramas, and instead create a world of rich material sufficiency where other people's private delusions need not be of any importance to anyone else.