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If you look at the above-linked articles, you'll start to notice a pattern. The pattern falls out like a rock. Wherever nationalism, populism and culture win out over globalism and progressivism, Russia is there tampering with the levers of power.
True or not, the accusation that Russia is promoting anti-globalism and a multi-lateral geopolitical world is only bad if you are a globalism swine.
For perspective, the US has provably and admittedly interfered in other nations' elections since at least 1948, in Italy, and most likely long before that. The US used to justify this interference as bringing "democracy" to the downtrodden masses and rescuing the world from "communism," whether those nations wanted it or not.
What makes the Russian situation rather comical is not only the fact that she is accused of destroying globalism - without actually ever saying that, but that Vlad Putin appears to be the busiest man in the world. On top of that, Putin is probably the greatest intellect ever in the history of everything and never makes a mistake or loses a contest.
When you pull back a get a little perspective on things, you realize that neither Russia nor Putin are capable of doing everything they have been accused of. We are asked to believe that Russia has the time, resources and desire to deeply penetrate the media, social movements and politics of just about every Western nation - and a few others - in the world. There must literally be a huge, dark, subterranean chamber in Siberia full of thousands of Russian hackers and advertisers working literally around the clock hacking every existing mind-control system out there.
Not only are the Russians capable of this, but they are master manipulators, insidiously guiding the though patterns of millions of people, particularly in the moments leading up to a vote.
In a plot worthy of the best Bond villain ever, Russia cleverly deploys RT articles and Facebook ads at just the right moment, using carefully selected trigger words to make you vote the way they want you to. Like a zombie, your mind has been taken over with anti-globalism thoughts because Russia, masters of the most subtle aspects of every Western language on Earth, can carefully craft messages that slide right past all your psychological and rational defenses and induce you to pull the voting lever against your will.
The whole thing is patently absurd, if not downright preposterous.
The underlying assumption in all this is that you and I are completely mindless idiots susceptible to anyone with a mastery of advertising and social media.
In short, it is good if we all blindly follow Uncle Sam's mental manipulations, but it is a crime bordering on genocide if any other entity is able to override and undo it. That is basically what Russia is being accused of.
The thing is, if Russia is wrong for doing it, then everyone is wrong - including a corporation or government near you. It doesn't matter how altruistic and noble the cause is, if any entity attempts to override an individual's thought processes, it is wrong.
That all media outlets everywhere are attempting to manipulate our dreams, desires and beliefs is a given. For more than a century, the mass media has been used to steer the populace this way and that - whether it is inducing us to buy products and images, or William Randolph Hearst taking the nation to war. The marketing and PR machine has infused itself into our most private and secure realm - our minds.
The wailing indictment of Russia in the Western mediasphere is equally an indictment of itself. The only real difference is the degree to which one side or the other is controlling our minds.
None of this absolves us from individual responsibility. We must be eternally vigilant against the invasion of our most sacred inner spaces. We must educate ourselves, recognize the manipulations and repulse the attacks, whether it is Russians trying to control our voting fingers, or the Western media-industrial empire trying to make us believe that our conscious choices are not ours.
And therein lies the crux of the matter. The Western political media and the corporations that own them are scared spitless by the huge wave of nationalism and the wholesale rejection of globalism and unbridled immigration, and the resulting destruction of national and cultural identity. The only way they have to fight it is to convince us that our decisions are not ours, but are the result of insidious manipulation by the evil Russians.
It's not working, but we must remain on guard, because the attack against the new nationalism will increase, and the methods and channels used to manipulate us will increase in number and strength. The globalists have spent centuries building up their command and control structures, and they will not just give up and walk away.
Today, it's Russians, but when that narrative fails - and it will sooner than later - there will be a new bogeyman. The more we, as individuals, assert control over our own thoughts and destinies, the more the attacks will increase. The only defense we have is knowledge. Learn how these systems work, and they will lose power over you.
One cannot fight an invisible enemy, and learning how it operates makes it clearly visible.
It is amazing that anyone can take the Trump/Russia conspiracy seriously. At the very least, for the US to accuse ANY other country of interfering with its elections is so disingenuous as to induce guffaws in any aware individual. Furthermore, the story employs one of the simplest forms of deception - misdirection. Finally, it is nothing more than a 100-year-old geopolitical effort to isolate Russia, as it sits squarely in the middle of nearly ever strategic location on Earth.
To quality my remarks, I hold no truck with Trump (score for triple-letter alliteration). I think he is a bombastic blowhard who may be a wily real estate mogul and carnival barker, but has zero interest or sense when it comes to history and long-term effects beyond the bottom line of the annual report.
That said, for the US to get its panties in a bunch over election rigging is seriously funny. The country that has interfered with elections in nearly every country on Earth has little room to call the kettle black. Since at least Teddy Roosevelt's Cuban and Panamanian adventures, and certainly since the 1948 Italian elections, the US has begged, borrowed and stolen elections the world over. In addition, the US Department of Homeland Security assured voters that the 2016 elections were secure on its say-so. If not, then disband the DHS and put its officers in prison.
The Russian hacking story got legs after WikiLeaks released internal email it received most likely from Seth Rich and others on the inside of the Democratic Party leadership. Other than firing Debbie Wasserman Schultz and killing Seth Rich, the DNC has opted not to address its internal pond scum, but rather keep everyone distracted with accusations of Russian interference. The whole issue is little more than a case of sour grapes, combined with a panicked effort to keep everyone looking at the messenger, rather than focus on the message: the DNC is full of slime-sucking pigs.
In the final analysis, though, the US effort to create Russian bug-a-boos is a continuation of a century of more effort to isolate Russia. With the largest land mass of any country on Earth, spanning Europe and Asia, with vast natural resources, Russia could easily threaten the US empire, and has for a long time. The US considers Europe its plaything and is deathly afraid to have Russia exert any influence over it. In recent years, Russia has cozied up with China, an economic monster created by the US in the 1970s, and together they are an existential threat to US hegemony. The Russia-China alliance, which increasingly includes Africa and South America (see Brazil), could easily expand to surround the US in a way far more threatening than NATO pop-guns in Poland and the Ukraine.
All empires need an enemy to prop them up, and Russia fits the bill. The US can't attack China directly, because most of its manufacturing has been exported there, so that leaves Russia by default. Furthermore, greenies in the US have all but shut down oil and gas production in that country, making Russia the logical supplier of choice for Europe's energy needs. The US desperately needs to keep Europe a vassal state, but Europe desperately needs Russia to survive. Catch-22.
That Venezuela and Brazil are in melt-down mode is a perfect example of how the US manipulates countries for its geopolitical ends. That the US can actually accuse Russia of interference with its internal affairs is laughable, at best. We won't even get into Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, and Ecuador, much less the Central American republics that the US steadfastly stirred and shaken.
While the US implodes, the rest of the world watches with bemusement at the astounding duplicity and perfidy of its internal politics.
Come to think of it, Trump is exactly the president the US needs and deserves.
We have to start off with apologies for vanishing for a couple of days. Between a sudden bit of bad news and a burst of activity, this week became reallly busy really fast.
I don't know if it is the Trump Effect or just first-of-the-year budgets, but work has picked up dramatically in the opening weeks of 2017. I've booked more hours in two weeks than I did for all of the fourth quarter of 2016, and I've been living out of the back of an Uber. I leave the house at just before 6a, and don't get home again until 8:30p.
Not that I'm complaining. Last year was a complete wash out. As I look back on it, I've come the suspect that the world was seemingly resigned to a Clinton administration and was prepared for the worst economically. However, the Trump election appears to have kicked everyone in the butt, either in anticipation of economic renewal, or out of sheer panic that old markets are drying up.
In my lifetime of just over half a century, I do not recall such a major shift in social, political and economic winds. I might compare it to the 1980s, right after Reagan was elected and there was a bump in excitement after the Democratic Carter administration, that also nearly ran the world into economic ruin.
One thing I will say about Democrats is that they are masters at killing business. But I guess that's to be expected from a party that vehemently defended slavery, gave the world a central banking system, introduced the personal income tax, and expanded two regional European conflicts into global catastrophes. Someone really should put those bastards out of our misery.
If you're Republican, don't feel too smug. Your party is only a hair's breadth better because occasionally you manage to get a candidate that lowers taxes and deregulates everything, which kicks entrepreneurs like myself into gear. I think it's more by accident than design, since nothing having to do with government is for the betterment of us real people.
To see just how demented and slimy the Republicans can be, just look at John McCain.
Whatever Trump is achieving, even in these past few weeks before officially taking office, is re-introducing a peculiarly American form of mercantilistic capitalism that has got the Chinese literally shitting their britches. Folks in the States may be a bit distracted to see clearly see what's going on, but here in Asia it is readily apparent.
The US swung suddenly and violently from literally kowtowing to Chinese dominance, to the polar opposite of not taking any guff off the kids in Beijing. Even something as seemingly benign as Trump taking a phone call from the president of Taiwan has set off a fire-storm of panic in the gilded halls of the Forbidden City. In short, the Socialists are profoundly spooked at the re-emergence of Fascism.
Lest the reader be confused at this point, one would do well to poke back into our archives, where we talk extensively about the basic philosophical similarities between Socialism and Fascism, with the differences being little more than who gets to sit closest to the salt at the Bildergerg dinners. The bit that looks like Capitalism is where government deregulates the playing field so the little guy has much more equal footing with the massive global corporate interests.
In any case, the Chinese are quickly asserting themselves to get as much damage control in place as they can before the Trump Era begins. They have been sailing their warships all over the South China Sea in a geopolitical form of flexing on the beach. They have overtly threatened the US if anyone so much as breathes in the general direction of the One-China Policy. They have signaled their "desire" to participate in any infrastructure rebuilding in the States. They have also been calling Putin daily to invite him for some chow at the palace, desperately afraid that Russia will start moving in a Westerly direction, since they clearly know that Russia is only their buddy because the US has been such a bunch of horse's patoots for the past two decades.
At any rate, gotta run. I'ts 4:30a and time to shower up and order Uber. I will get back on schedule next week, when I have the weekend to get my posts prepared. In the meantime, be sure and follow our Twitter feed @RadioFarSide for dispatches on important headlines affecting the Sino-American situation and thanks for your kind patience.
And to my beloved sister, who passes away suddenly in her sleep, I am happy that your pain is ended and that your passing was without unnecessary drama, but your absence is sorely felt and your laughter will be profoundly missed. Slan agus beannach mo dheirfiúr.
Well, here we go with the top news stories of 2016. Yesterday, we covered the various passings that have marked the year that was, from the great to the small. Today, we want to focus on the more entertaining parts of pop culture, namely the headlines.
Our take on things is, of course, a bit different. We focus on the stories that will likely have far-reaching impact on the future, and believe it not, we don't think the Trump presidency is one of them. In fact, the entire election cycle of 2016, while being wildly entertaining and providing gobs of grist for the mill, will like a Hollywood blockbuster have little or no nutritional value for the brain.
Instead, we will focus on some stories that flew in under the radar, but which will likely come back to haunt us in major ways in the near-to-far future.
The first thing we focus on also happens to be one of the most recent: the assassination of Andrey Karlov, the Russian Ambassador to Turkey. Likely related to that event was the downing of a Russian jet over the Black Sea with a Russian military choir on its way to Syria to entertain the troops for Christmas and New Year.
This event is a fire starter - a slow burn in the coal scuttle that will eventually leap into dramatic flame, much like the assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand in Sarajevo that touched off World War One. To any aware observer, this event couldn't be more obvious. It was meant, as so many other events over the past two decades, to goad Russia into war. The provocations include the Ukraine mess, NATO camping out on Russian borders, "friendly fire" incidents in Syria, and the overt acts of war generally called the Economic Sanctions set in place because 98% of Crimean people voted to rejoin the Russian Federation and Russia accepted.
And all this against a country that just a few years ago was America's best buddy in Asia after the Wall Fall. In fact, Russia was seen as the foil by which the West could keep China down on the farm.
Well, it didn't work out that way. Instead, Russia and China teamed up to form the BRICSA group, who announced their intention to start an alternative financial clearing system that threatens the Dollar Hegemony and the SWIFT cabal. Since that time, the Western media, mouthpieces for the Shadow Government, have been steadily driving Russia's image into the dirt - or at least trying.
Despite all the humiliations and public trashings the West has heaped on Russia, they have shown remarkable restraint, preferring instead to fight through media and public relations, figuring the "whipping boy" image garners sympathy and admiration from the rest of the world, which it certainly seems to have done. However, their patience is not boundless.
Certainly, the murder of a top diplomat in a key nation, plus the jet downing, must be pressing on the Kremlin's last nerve. We can assume that investigators will thoroughly document proof of Western involvement, and then take their case to the world in the hopes of stirring significant ill will towards the US, and most definitely put it on the table when negotiating with the Trump administration, which has promised to lighten up a bit. In any event, a significant story to watch.
Another important story, and one that will have long-lasting effects on all our daily lives, is the so-called "fake news" phenomenon. In addition to being used to tar and feather Russia (again), it is also part of a much larger effort to take full control of the internet, a process that was begun with Obama's signing over ICANN to the UN in October, plus rise and empowerment of WIPO, have touched off a rapidly growing effort to shut down free speech on the internet.
There is nothing more dangerous to human liberty than giving any government body the ability to control how and what its opposition can say. This ability is especially powerful when "intellectual property" rights can be used to control people's ability to cite reference materials in their writings and speech. This combination can literally shut down free inquiry, independent reporting and academic research all in one fell swoop. The associated rise of "fact checkers" and "information arbiters" is a very dangerous game in which almost everyone loses.
Every discovery ever made in human history came from rearranging existing facts and applying novel interpretations to them. If one can control the facts that are widely available and the interpretations that are deemed "acceptable," one effectively controls the mind of humanity and certainly shuts down any voyages of discovery in the general population, not to mention political opposition.
One to watch, and fight tooth and nail, going forward.
The next major story is one that is truly bubbling just under the surface, and there is a full-on effort to stifle it, as it could literally destroy the global ruling class. The story is, of course, Pizzagate.
Wikipedia immediately labeled this story a "conspiracy theory" and says it has been debunked. The now-discredited Snopes jumped all over it and declared it a non-item. "News" outlets have all but shut the story up, except to rant on about a "lone gunman" who walked into Comet Ping Pong in an obvious attempt to discredit the story. In other words, it's a very dangerous story to certain groups who desperately want it to go away.
The story broke during WikiLeaks' release of John Podesta's email during the presidential campaign. There were numerous references to "pizza" and other code words that are known to be pedophile jargon. The email mentioned several pizza restaurants around the US, specifically Comet Ping Pong in Washington, D.C., and the references were connected to other mentions of "spirit cooking," a truly sick form of black magic
This story is a huge deal. Dozens of researchers have spent decades documenting child-sex rings at the highest levels of power. Though nearly snuffed out, the Jimmy Seville case almost blew the lid off of the story. Before that, researchers have been tracing this practice since the 1950s, showing that Child Protection Services, kidnapping rings and other sources provided thousands of children each year to service high-level clients.
The practice has been tied to the Roman Church abuse of children dating back to the 1800s in Canada, the Bohemian Grove antics of the US power elite, black magic rituals, and the use of pedophilia as a means to ensure silence among the participants. There are also long-standing rumors that Stanley Kubrick was murdered for the subtle and not-so-subtle revelations in his films The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut. If proof of this practice were ever to see the light of day, it would cause a global and violent backlash against the ruling classes that would change the course of history. Naturally, it must be squelched with every possible effort.
The Podesta email provided one of the biggest breaks ever in research of the practice. It named places and people, gave code words, and have led to the discovery of all sorts of corroborating evidence, such as advertising, that clearly imply nefarious activities of a most grotesque nature.
Needless to say, the people who research this subject are tireless and stay on it for decades. With this kind of information coming to the public, it has reinvigorated them in a way that Jimmy Seville's story did and shows the global nature of the problem. This story will not go away anytime soon, and there are likely to be more revelations coming to light over the coming year and beyond.
Finally, the major story of the century will most likely be the weather, and this year the New Ice Age started to become apparent. Over the year, oddly cold spells, strange snow events, heavy rains, record frosts, and other events signalled the coming Big Chill, though the constant brow-beating of Global Warming over the past three decades, combined with repeated scandals of data manipulation, have either got most people unable to see it, or simply burned out on the whole climate debate.
As the story goes, this past solar cycle has been unnervingly quiet. The sunspot counts are way down and solar activity of all kinds have been waning for the past three years. This has caused Earth's magnetic shield to weaken and destabilize, with the poles wandering closer to the equator on their way to converging sometime over Indonesia.
At the same time, the weaker shield has allowed much higher levels of cosmic radiation to penetrate Earth's atmosphere resulting in higher evaporation rates from the oceans. This higher moisture content in the atmosphere meets with rapidly cooling temperatures due to reduced solar output, causing vast flooding and snow events worldwide, including the most recent heavy snows in North Africa, one of the hottest regions on Earth.
Careful reading of food quality and price reports shows a steady decrease in food quality combined with a steady increase in prices across the board for grain, fruit and leafy vegetables. Harvest outputs have been declining over the past three years due to flooded fields and frost damage.
This story will become increasingly visible over the coming couple of years as the Sun enters a periodic minimum causing global temperatures to drop rapidly and a whole host of problems to crop up as a result. Though attempts are and will continue to be made to blame Global Warming and human activity. Cooling is, however, a far worse problem that warming and has nothing to do with anything humans are doing.
The extent of this story depends entirely on the Sun. A severe minimum combined with Earth's magnetic poles reversing would likely be catastrophic. Because so much time and money has been wasted on the Global Warming fairy tale, we are ill-prepared for what's coming, with declining food supplies, large areas becoming uninhabitable and the possibility of ocean levels dropping precipitously resulting in toxic salinity levels for marine life. No one really knows how severe the situation will be, but higher food prices and political instability are certainly the least of the problems to come.
Obviously, the stories the Corporate Media want us to focus on pale in comparison to our top picks here. Oh sure, the election made good theater, Brexit was chat-worthy and WikiLeaks stole a lot of headlines, but all of them will fade in weeks or months, replaced with more entertaining "news." The stories that will affect most of humanity going forward are the ones being assiduously kept under wraps. We are not meant to bother ourselves with real issues, and that distracts from our ability to be controlled.
Stay tuned tomorrow as we release our world-famous Predilection Issue 2016, looking at the most likely headlines for 2017 - good, bad and indifferent. That will be followed by a little break for us Far Siders as we welcome the New Year and get roaring drunk in the jungle of Borneo.
The first rule of covert operations, once referred to as "false flag" attacks back when flags were a thing, is that one must create a plausible enemy.
One of the best dramatizations of covert operations I've ever found is The Princess Bride. Follow me here, I know it's not what you expected.
The evil Prince Humperdinck of Florin wants to attack Guilder, a neighboring country, for economic benefits. He hatches a plot to have his wildly popular bride-to-be kidnapped and specific clues left to point the finger at Guilder operatives. The plan goes awry when the anti-hero, a man dressed in black and wearing a mask called Dread Pirate Roberts, intervenes to save the future princess bride.
This brilliant and humorous film subtly shows how possible it is to create an enemy, blame it for everything wrong in your own country, and have your best-laid plans shot out from under you by someone who, on the surface, looks like a bad guy.
It also shows how comedy is often one of the best ways to deliver serious messages in a non-threatening manner.
Speaking of comedy, let's turn our attention to the US, shall we?
For months now, the US media and the Democratic Party - which includes its titular head Barack Obama - have done everything in their power to vilify the Russians, and especially Vladimir Putin. The Russians have been blames for everything from economic collapse to low-flush toilets. The US has in effect poked Russia with sharp sticks, and then runs to mommy when the bear growls. Even Hillarys clear and blatant vote-rigging in the primary elections has been blamed on nefarious Russian agents.
There is only one reason for this unbridled effort to demonize the Russians: they are to be used as a scapegoat for something big. We can only guess at the scope and nature of the plan, but the obvious part is that the Russian are being played for Guilder, and one suspects that Trump is the Dread Pirate Roberts, the vilified masked party-crasher.
Don't get me wrong here - the Republicans are not innocents, they have their own plan that looks something like The Hunt for Red October. But it's the Democratic Party's Princess Bride scenario that is front-and-center at the moment.
And yes, there's a reason I often use movie plots to explain current events. The way I see it, Hollywood is the US version of a war college, where various scenarios are literally played out as a form of entertainment, both to soften the public mind by planting memes, and the other to see to which plots the public will take most kindly. Most major studio movies are behavioral modification efforts that teach audiences how to act, what to believe and what to expect. If we judge by the most prominent themes in movies, we are in for dystopian societies, apocalyptic wars and marauding aliens.
If you ever want to know what the US is planning, just watch movies.
Dateline - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: So, here we are in KL taking a little time to work on the cultural life of the world and do all we can to elevate the spirit and increase intellectualism, and you guys let the planet go to hell in a handbasket. What gives? Can't we leave you guys alone for 10 minutes without all hell breaking loose? Sheesh...do we have to do everything around here?
Here we've got Obammie letting slip the dogs of war and *POOF*, we've got ISIS popping up in Iraq withing days, and no one says the obvious that Obammie was in on the whole ISIS thing? C'mon, this is such an obvious ploy to draw Iran out of its comfort zone and provide grist for the now-30-year campaign to take over and carve up that ancient land.
We're not even going to tread on the whole ISIS name thing and how it refers to an ancient Babylonian goddess names Eshtar (Easter) and how the goddess Isis is the model for the whole Mary Mother of God and Jesus thing. We have an undying faith in the native intelligence of our readers here to put those pieces together all by themselves.
Then, we have the whole Pope wants new Third Council of Nicaea with his homey the Patriarch of Constantinople (aka Istanbul) on the 1,700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea in AD325. In case your church history is a bit rusty, the First Council is the one that decided what was and wasn't canon for all of Christianity, and thus created what we call the Bible. The second council in AD787 was notable for authorizing the worship of graven images, called icons lest you confuse them with the Old Testament ban on such things. Both of these councils were part of seven ecumenical councils of the day to determine what was 'good' religion, and what was 'bad'. So, what can we expect in 2025, when the Third Council gets done pontificating?
Not that any of it did much good, because a couple of centuries later, Pope Bonaface VIII declared the Vatican the center of the Universe and everyone ended up getting a divorce, called excommunication in relgion-speak. By the way, if you're watching such things, it appears that Francis I is re-asserting Bonaface's Unam Sanctum making the Vatican the de facto One World Government and Official One Worl Religion...a papal decree that lies at the heart of our current state slavery issues.
And the worm turns...
Meantime, the US is experiencing an immigrant crisis, not unlike when the Irish, Italians, Russians, and all the other waves of immigrants came over. The central factor in this problem is that the white folk ain't breeding fast enough to pay for the aging Baby Boom drag on Social Security, so the state needs more taxpayers and will hand out citizenship to anyone stupid enough to take it. There's a reason that the number of folks giving up US citizenship is skyrocketing. Why in the hell would a bunch of illiterate, nomadic farmers want citizenship? Oh, looks like we answered our own question.
In other news, the Indonesian presidential elections are coming to a head on 9 July, with Soeharto II versus a not-so-eloquent JFK type. It's neck-and-neck, if you believe the bought-and-paid-for polls, with accusations flying that one candidate is a closet christian, while the other is a closet dictator. It's all rather exciting and a lot of folks are threatening to leave the country is one or the other gets elected, though the consensus seems to be that the JFK type will clean up corruption better than the Fascist. Folks are banking on the rupiah to tank if the Fascist gets in. Place you bets accordingly.
In Russia, Putin continues his campaign to be Alpha Male of the Year, and having some success at it. All we know is that we attended the Russian National Day affair here in Jakarta and it was swank. Ritz-Carlton ballroom, lots of fine food, free-flow vodka, and a slick multi-media presentation of the national anthems and a not-so-subtle plug for Russian business. Considering the American ambassador is xenophobic, we hardly expect the US National Day to out-shine, especially since budgets have been tight for such things.
On the hearts-and-minds front, the Russian embassy is working to bring the Bolshoi Ballet to Jakarta, while the US embassy is now strip-searching people entering their compound.
In related news, our little 3-story, 3,000 sqm art and culture project proceeds apace. The galleries are now open, with the museum and theater coming up fast. We're working 15-hour days trying to get all the duckies in a row, though it's a bit like herding cats. Who'da thunk there were so many damn moving parts in art? We're wearing so many hats that our hair is falling out from the friction of changing them so much, not to mention the stress. But hey! No one can say we don't put our money where our big mouth is, right? We go on and on about culture and art raising society and advancing intelligence, so here we are working our little deer-ee-ear off to make it happen. So there.
So, it's all good. God is in his heaven and all is right with the world, if you keep your sense of humor about the ridiculous games the so-called Poopers-What-Be keep playing. These numb-nuts haven't changed their playbook in something like one-and-a-half millennia. Talk about entrenched thinking. Makes it easy to run circles around them, though.
In case it's been upper-most on your mind wondering what we've been doing here on the Far Side, now you know: laughing at the PWB, traveling to strange lands and laying waste, going to swank diplomatic parties, and bringing ice to the natives (see Mosquito Coast for this obscure reference).
Stay tuned for some impressions on KL. To prepare yourself, see our many rants on neo-Fascist Singapore.
Have you noticed anything? Do you see it also? The world changed last week, and if you weren't looking, you might have missed it.
One of the most significant changes in geopolitical relations in the past 50 years flew right under the RADAR and landed smack in the middle of the Western Banking Establishment's lap. Russia, China and now India have made a gas deal that will take the US and the dollar out of the energy business in Asia. In other words, three of the hottest economies on the planet just thumbed their collective nose at Western hegemony. It was amazing to watch.
Most of us alive today don't remember a time when the US was an agrarian, second-class economy. In fact, if you were born anytime during the 1950s or later, you've never known a world were the US wasn't a black hole of power and resources. That old world just ended. There is indeed a New World Order, and the neighborhood bully just got kicked out of the club.
What brought the US to prominence, beside being the last man standing after WW2, was that it meant business. It created thngs and exported things and created wealth. In recent years, however, it has been a net importer, a debtor and has all but lost the innovative edge that made her name.
You may have not been aware that the US has spent several decades shutting down coal, oil and gas production, preferring instead - and at great risk as the 1970s showed - to use everyone else's energy reserves. But, as the Western Banking Establishment has grown increasingly panicked, suddenly all those oil, gas and coal fields that were shut in under the guise of ecological concern are now open for business and the country is ramping up production in a huge way.
At one time, the world was happy to take the US jobs and money, and were willing to take the BS that went with it. In recent times, though, the US has devolved into a militaristic mercantile empire exporting only bombs and debt, and the world has grown weary of it.
Instead, they now look to Russia and China as the economic powerhouses and perceive that those countries are far more legitimate because they bring business without egregious strings attached. There are no agendas besides pure economic benefit - no ideological ham-fisted Agenda 21s or Pax Americana or nation building/regime change to go with the forced indebtedness.
Furthermore, everyone except the poor duped Americans themselves see quite clearly that Obama is a self-serving, illegitimate occupant at the reins, and see even more clearly that he does not run the country. They know very well that the banksters and corporate interests set the agenda in the US, and that the country's political and legal systems are nothing more than mafioso enforcement schemes to protect the "too big to fails".
Now Russia and China have entered into an energy agreement that shuts the Western oligarchs out of the deal. Soon, India will join because pipeline routes will be able to come right around any Western-controlled puppet states. This is the foundation of a new and quite seperate financial system that will force the Western banksters to their knees, or provoke them into rash military response, which will make plain to the world the illegitimacy of the empire, whose ideology is based solely on greed and avarice.
Empires don't crash and burn. They fade over decades, centuries, and even millennia (c.f. Rome). The US empire will not crash. The dollar will not go up in flames. It will slowly fade away into obscurity and people find viable alternatives and adjust to new paradigms. The greatest mistake the US could make at this point is military adventurism, though that is likely what will happen, given the inbred stupidity controlling the country.
There is only one real answer that the American people can give now. Don't vote. Stay away from elections in droves. This vote of "no confidence" is the only thing that can force the cockroaches into the sunlight and show them for what they are. There is no political solution at the polls, and by not voting, the oligarchs will be forced to retain power without consent and thus expose their despotism.
Not voting en masse is the only peaceful means left to expose and debunk the power-mad slime. They have horrific weapons that make open conflict and revolution untenable. They control the judiciary and legal processes with unflinching fists. They even control the electoral process to the point that voting is pointless. The outcome is predetermined. Therefore, NOT voting is the only way to answer tyranny without force or immoral acts. The only way they maintain the illusion of legitimacy is by getting folks to the polls, thus fooling the rubes into thinking that their minions were selected democratically. Without the pretense of fair and open elections, they can not claim any semblance of legitimate power, and will be forced to keep power by open aggression. At that point, they have lost without a shot being fired. They would have no legitimacy either in the domestic nor global arenas.
As George Carlin rightly said, you only have the right to complain if you don't participate in the fraud.
Yes, folks, the roar of concern over our long silence on the Far Side has been heard! We apologize for yanking the rug out from under everyone, but unfortunately, we have yet to discover circumventions to the Laws of Physics, though we are trying furiously!
As we described the situation in one recent response to a long-time reader, we are busy putting all our rants and raves into action. On top of that, everything we've examined and fretted over here in this column is now coming into reality, so there seems little point to reiterating what can be found in copious amounts in our archives.
As we have previously mentioned, our latest project has been starting up Indonesia's first international-standard theater, as well as several large galleries, a museum, and all the ancillary things attendant to them.
A theater is an incredibly complex series of interlocking technologies married to highly specialized architecture to deliver a spectacle for the eyes and ears. Cable trucks as big around as a man carry signals to lighting instruments, communications, sound, and rigging, and any mistake in judgement could kill a person.
Consideration like having the systems isolated from the internet because nasties like StuxNet infect the control systems of theaters that support incredibly large loads over people's heads. A misfire or miscommunication among any of the myriad parts could end up in disaster, as the experience at the Apollo Theater in London a few months back will attest.
Most people are blissfully unaware of how complex putting on modern stage shows can be, and really, that's the point. The audience is supposed to be amazed and enthralled, not thinking about how that massive chandelier was hung over their heads. All of the effort and machinery are supposed to be invisible or the illusion is lost. Yet, somewhere in all that mix, someone has to worry about the safety and security of that 3-year-old in the 24th row who is staring in wide-eyed amazement at flying Disney characters - not on TeeVee or the movie screen - but in real life.
Among our copious responsibilities is knowing the dizzying intricacies of the theater's innards. If a single cable ceases to function properly, it is our responsibility to know where that cable originates, where it terminates, and the precise path it takes in between. We must know precisely how much load and stress can be applied to any given spot on the stage or in the rafters. We must know the precise measurements of every function of every system in the venue.
Add to that the various social and political concerns of being GM of such a place - it's unique position in Indonesian history - and the desire to inform, educate and entertain large masses of people, and one can begin to appreciate the demands on the time of an individual.
Despite the demands and stresses of managing such an effort - still in construction phase - we would not have it any other way. We have always maintained that when one does the thing one loves the most, there is no such thing as work. There is only joy.
Some letter writers to us on the Far Side have asked why we don't have columns on Malaysia Air or the Ukraine situation. The simple answer is that our answers are contained in the archives.
Malaysia Air is a distraction. It is an operation planned and executed to do one thing - keep you from looking at the Big Picture. The Ukraine is little more than the dying crash of Western hegemony and the rise of the New East. These are topics we have explored at great length within these pages.
The Malaysia Air mystery is designed to soak up headlines and column inches, distract the minds, and hold attention off other - more important - events. There is something in this story for everyone, conspiracy theorist or not. If there is in fact a real flight with real people involved, then our heart goes out to them for their suffering. But we are unconvinced to the extent that we have followed the story at all. It is not a cause, but a symptom of a much larger story being played out on the world's theater, with its attendant million moving parts.
The Ukraine story is also a symptom and part of the kibuki theater of global politics. Not to make light of the suffering there, but the people of the Ukraine must at some point see that they are being manipulated in a crass and cynical game of geo-pissing.
The Western oligarchs set into motion back in the 80s a plan to crater the Soviet system, rearrange the Mid-East to their liking, and ensure that none of them could mount a serious challenge to Western hegemony.
They had not counted on China having its own agenda. Instead, they were supposed to be infinitely grateful to the banksters for having unloaded tons of toxic debt within their borders. They had not counted on the Russians experiencing a moral and religious reawakening and cleaning house of the mafia corruption, as Putin has done. They had not counted on the internet becoming a means of circumventing the official media and mind-numbing distractions of network TeeVee. In short, they f^cked up.
Once they realized what they had done, the various factions within the bankster class began fighting amongst themselves trying either to salvage the original plan, or scavenge for any amount of power and wealth as could be grabbed in the collapse. The dominant group, myopically and pathetically wedded to their 40-year-old plan, are moving as fast as they can to complete it, though nearly all the assumptions of their plan - all the million variables - have changed, and it is no longer viable.
Thus, the Ukraine, and Libya, and Syria, and Iran, and Afghanistan, Egypt, et cetera ad nauseum.
The collapse of Empires is a dangerous time, but as the Chinese say, there is opportunity in chaos, or as their Western counterparts would say, Ordo ab chao.
As the audience, we have three choices: 1) we can sit passively and be enthralled like a 3-year-old in the 24th row; 2) we can seek to understand all the miles of cabling and systems integration of the theater we call the world/ or 3) we can ignore the bastards, refuse to buy a ticket and go set up our own show elsewhere. We here on the Far Side stand firmly in the Option 3 camp.
Changing alliances, parallel financial systems, the emerging BRICS nations, Vladimir Putin leader of the free world, the collapse of the Anglo-American empire. All this and much, much more on this installment of Radio Far Side.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts has been Asst. Secretary of the US Treasury, editor for Business Week and the Wall Street Journal, a syndicated columnist, and member of the Cato Institute. He has written numerous books on economics and politics and has a worldwide audience for his regular online columns.
Dr. Robers joins Radio Far Side to discuss the sobering but fascinating trends in global events. From the fall of the dollar to the rise of Russia and China, we explore the Mid-East wars, Germany's next moves, the use of NATO to start a new Cold War, and the deep claws of the Military-Industrial Complex. Where does Indonesia stand in all this? What are the likely outcomes of current events over the next few months, and what of the American people caught between opposing allegiances?
Join us for an hour with one of the most respected commentators on economic issues.
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