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What is left roaming our wilderness of mirrors depends on the mood swings of the Goddess of the Market. No wonder an effect of Eurasia integration will be a death blow to Bretton Woods and “democratic” neoliberalism, says Pepe Escobar.

Get ready for a major geopolitical chessboard rumble: from now on, every butterfly fluttering its wings and setting off a tornado directly connects to the battle between Eurasia integration and Western sanctions as foreign policy.

It is the paradigm shift of China’s New Silk Roads versus America’s Our Way or the Highway. We used to be under the illusion that history had ended. How did it come to this?

Hop in for some essential time travel. For centuries the Ancient Silk Road, run by mobile nomads, established the competitiveness standard for land-based trade connectivity; a web of trade routes linking Eurasia to the – dominant – Chinese market.

In the early 15^th century, based on the tributary system, China had already established a Maritime Silk Road along the Indian Ocean all the way to the east coast of Africa, led by the legendary Admiral Zheng He. Yet it didn’t take much for imperial Beijing to conclude that China was self-sufficient enough – and that emphasis should be placed on land-based operations.

Deprived of a trade connection via a land corridor between Europe and China, Europeans went all-out for their own maritime silk roads. We are all familiar with the spectacular result: half a millennium of Western dominance.

Until quite recently the latest chapters of this Brave New World were conceptualized by the Mahan, Mackinder and Spykman trio.

The Heartland of the World

Mackinder

Halford Mackinder’s 1904 Heartland Theory – a product of the imperial Russia-Britain New Great Game – codified the supreme Anglo, and then Anglo-American, fear of a new emerging land power able to reconnect Eurasia to the detriment of maritime powers.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Discretion in the Hands of Every Government Agent = Tyranny

August 26, 2018

Discretion in the Hands of Every Government Agent = Tyranny

There has been an interesting case of an American Muslim woman who had her phone seized by border guards as she returned home to the United States from a trip to Switzerland. The guards just seized her phone and she had to file a lawsuit to get it returned after 120 days. Meanwhile, they refuse to confirm or deny that a copy of her phone was made and shared with any other agency. This is part of the problem with the rule of law – there is none! Government agents can do whatever they desire and it is always your burden to hopefully find a judge who will at least acknowledge you have any rights at all.

Most people will never think of various crimes by the British that led to the American Revolution. Then there was the No Taxation Without Representation slogan. But the act that perhaps began the Revolution was illegal search and seizure.

The legal case that became the seminal beginning of the American Revolution was Entick v. Carrington and Three Other King’s Messengers, reported at length in 19 Howell’s State Trials 1029. This case was the start of the American Revolution and was also based upon an abuse of the king’s agents. The action, dated November 1762, was for trespassing and interfering with the plaintiff’s dwelling by breaking open his desks and boxes and searching and examining his papers.

George III (b 1738; 1760-1820) became king in 1760. In February 1761, Parliament enacted the Writs of Assistance that was challenged in court in Boston, Massachusetts. These were writs that empowered every agent to do as they liked and were no different from how agents act today at their discretion. The Writs of Assistance allowed the king’s agents to search anything they suspected.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“God Help Us” – British Army Readied In Case Of Hard Brexit

July 30, 2018

“God Help Us” – British Army Readied In Case Of Hard Brexit

Just as was extremely evident prior to the actual vote in 2016, scaremongering around Brexit (deal or no deal) is escalating among the cognoscenti or desperate Remain ‘told you so’-ers.

Britain’s Sunday Times reports that UK ministers have drawn up plans to send in the army to deliver food, medicines and fuel in the event of shortages if Britain crashes out of the EU without a deal.

Blueprints for the armed forces to assist the civilian authorities, usually used only in civil emergencies, have been dusted down as part of the “no deal” planning, with helicopters and army trucks used to ferry supplies to vulnerable people outside the southeast who were struggling to obtain the medicines they needed.

However, as ominous as this sounds, The Sunday Times admits – a number of paragraphs into their “Army on standby for no-deal Brexit emergency” story – that a source inside the Ministry of Defense said they have not yet received “a formal request” to assist the civilian authorities.

And while desperate not to have this positioned as the work of “Project Fear’, pro-EU opposition MP David Lammy took aim at the news on Twitter saying: “God, help us. This is not coming from Remainers. This is not project fear. Pro-Brexit Ministers are drawing up blueprints for the army to deliver food, fuel and medicine if we leave the EU with no deal,” adding his own touch of hysteria… “We have a duty to prevent this self-immolation.”

✔

God, help us. This is not coming from Remainers. This is not project fear. Pro-Brexit Ministers are drawing up blueprints for the army to deliver food, fuel and medicine if we leave the EU with no deal. We have a duty to prevent this self-immolation.https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/army-on-standby-for-no-deal-brexit-emergency-dz3359lrf …

3:20 AM – Jul 29, 2018

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Arrest of Maria Butina Is Another Hoax

July 21, 2018

The Arrest of Maria Butina Is Another Hoax

The Guardian Neswspaper, which once was an honest newspaper that spoke for the British working class has now been suborned, in my opinion, by the CIA and British Intelligence (sic).

Perhaps you remember a few years ago that The Guardian complied with illegal orders from the corrupt UK government to destroy the Wikileak files that revealed US felonies and deceptions of so-called “allies,” who are nothing but Washington’s vassals.

What disturbs me about The Guardian is that it no longer guards truth and the working class. Instead The Guardian guards the extraordinary lies that serve the agenda of the US hegemonic state.

I cannot understand why any of The Guardian’s original subscribers read apologies for Washington’s crimes and misdeeds or why The Guardian prefers conflict instead of peace with Russia. Why does The Guardian work to increase hostility between nuclear powers that can easily result in the termination of life on earth? Are The Guardian’s editors paid by the CIA and UK “intelligence,” as the German newspaper editor Udo Ulfkotte said in his book, Bought Journalism, or are The Guardian’s editiors threatened with arrest and prison unless they serve the interests of the UK’s overlord in Washington?

Whatever The Guardian is, just like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and the rest of the Western presstitutes, journalism is not present on its pages. What the West has is a Ministry of Propaganda. The public is lied to and brainwashed, not informed.

We can see the total failure of The Guardian, and all the rest as well, in the reporting on the arrest of the alleged Russian spy, Maria Butina by the utterly corrupt US Department of Justice (sic). The principal evidence against Maria is that she met with a former Russian ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

NATO is a Con Game

July 12, 2018

NATO is a Con Game

Marc Riboud Forbidden City under the snow, Beijing 1957

Okay, well, Trump did it again. Antagonizing allies. This time it was Germany that took the main hit, over the fact that it pays Russia billions of dollars for oil and gas while relying on the US for its defense … against Russia. And yes, that is a strange situation. But it’s by no means the only angle to the story. There are many more.

For one thing, The US has by far the largest military industry. So it makes a lot of money off the billions already spent by NATO partners on weaponry. Of course Raytheon, Boeing et al would like to see them spend more. But once they would have done that, they would clamor for even more after.

At some point one must ask how much should really be spent. How much is enough, how much is necessary. The military-industrial complex (MIC) has every reason to make the threat posed by ‘enemies’ as big as they possibly can. So knowing that, we must take media reports on this threat with tons of salt.

And that is not easy. Because the MIC has great influence in politics and the media. But we can turn to some numbers. According to GlobalFirePower, the US in 2018 will spend $647 billion on its military, while Russia is to spend a full $600 billion less, at $47 billion. And the US Senate has already voted in a $82 billion boost recently.

There are other numbers out there that suggest Russia spends $60 billion, but even then. If Moscow spends just 10% of the US, and much less than that once all NATO members’ expenditure is included, how much of a threat can Russia realistically be to NATO?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Foundation of the West is Rocked as Tribalism Becomes Normality

July 11, 2018

The Foundation of the West is Rocked as Tribalism Becomes Normality

In our modern digital age, news comes at you fast. Never before has the spread of information traveled so quickly or social media been so influential. And never before have problems been exacerbated so rapidly.

The West is in turmoil, as chaos seeps into the very fibers of the institutions built up by global elites over the last century—institutions now finding themselves under assault.

Anyone paying attention, or reading my series of articles, knows there is a massive shift occurring in the zeitgeist of the West. It’s a shift that only occurs once in a lifetime, if at all.

We truly do live in interesting times, but they are dangerous too. The risk of structural collapse in many of our political systems is at all-time highs, with citizens all across the West demanding change from their leaders.

People are rapidly descending into “tribes”, consumed with self-reassuring, confirmation bias-assuaging articles written by their fellow “tribe” members.

Whether this comes from the “radical left” or the “alt right” doesn’t matter. What does is the damage it is doing to our systems and the risk they now pose to the dwindling minority of sane centralists.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

We see this change unfolding in front of our eyes, as scarcely a day goes by without reading about another “crisis” that threatens the very fabric of our society.

Within the past week alone, depending on which “tribe” you belong to, there have been numerous victories or catastrophes develop in rapid succession.

Last night, President Trump scored another major victory in the name of conservatives within the United States when he announced the nomination of his second Supreme Court pick, Judge Brett Kavanaugh. This came after Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement a few weeks ago.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Govt economic advisor warns British defence planners that growth is ending

July 6, 2018

Govt economic advisor warns British defence planners that growth is ending

Study charts the protracted collapse of industrial economic growth and why prosperity must be built on a new economic model. And no, the Singularity won’t save us.

Economic growth isn’t coming back. While some level of growth might continue in coming decades, the boom era of seemingly unlimited material throughput we became accustomed to in the middle of the twentieth century is unlikely to ever return again as we enter a fundamentally new age of diminishing returns

These are the conclusions of a new working paper by leading ecological economist Professor Tim Jackson, Director of the University of Surrey’s Centre for Understanding Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP).

And the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) is taking notes.

An earlier draft of the paper, notes Jackson, was “prepared as input into the UK Global Strategic Trends Review”, a forecasting research programme run by the MoD’s Defence Concepts and Doctrines Centre (DCDC), which every few years produces an updated Global Strategic Trends report for the MoD and wider UK government. Jackson also acknowledges feedback from MoD officials in revising that draft to create the concurrent version.

Jackson is former Economics Commissioner for the UK government’s Sustainable Development Commission. From 2010 to 2014, he was Director of the Sustainable Lifestyles Research Group, funded by the UK Department for the Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, Scottish Government, and the Economic and Social Research Council. He also advised many other government departments, and held advisory roles for the UN Environment Programme, the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the UN Industrial Development Organissation, the European Environment Agency, the European Parliament, and the New Zealand Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Letter From Britain: An Establishment Blinded By Russophobia

June 16, 2018

Letter From Britain: An Establishment Blinded By Russophobia

A British elite challenged by large parts of the British population is rallying around trumped-up fear of Russia as a means of protecting its interests, as Alexander Mercouris explains.

Hostility to Russia is one of the most enduring, as well as one of the most destructive, realities of British life. Its persistence is illustrated by one of the most interesting but least reported facts about the Skripal affair.

This is that Sergey Skripal, the Russian former GRU operative who was the main target of the recent Salisbury poisoning attack, was recruited by British intelligence and became a British spy in 1995, four years after the USSR collapsed, at a time when the Cold War was formally over.

In 1995 Boris Yeltsin was President of Russia, Communism was supposedly defeated, the once mighty Soviet military was no more, and a succession of pro-Western governments in Russia were attempting unsuccessfully to carry out IMF proposed ‘reforms’. In a sign of the new found friendship which supposedly existed between Britain and Russia the British Queen toured Moscow and St. Petersburg the year before.

Yet notwithstanding all the appearances of friendship, and despite the fact that Russia in 1995 posed no conceivable threat to Britain, it turns out that British intelligence was still up to its old game of recruiting Russian spies to spy on Russia.

Britain’s Long History of Russophobia

This has in fact been the constant pattern of Anglo-Russian relations ever since the Napoleonic Wars.

Brief periods of seeming friendship – often brought about by a challenge posed by a common enemy – alternating with much longer periods of often intense hostility.

This hostility – at least from the British side – is not easy to understand.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What Else Canadians Should Be Sorry For — Besides Burning the White House

June 16, 2018

What Else Canadians Should Be Sorry For — Besides Burning the White House

Six-years after the British landing at Jamestown, with the settlers struggling to survive and hardly managing to get their own local genocide underway, these new Virginians hired mercenaries to attack Acadia and (fail to) drive the French out of what they considered their continent.

The colonies that would become the United States decided to take over Canada in 1690 (and failed, again).

They got the British to help them in 1711 (and failed, yet again).

General Braddock and Colonel Washington tried again in 1755 (and still failed, except in the ethnic cleansing perpetrated and the driving out of the Acadians and the Native Americans).

The British and U.S. attacked in 1758 and took away a Canadian fort, renamed it Pittsburgh, and eventually built a giant stadium across the river dedicated to the glorification of ketchup.

George Washington sent troops led by Benedict Arnold to attack Canada yet again in 1775.

An early draft of the U.S. Constitution provided for the inclusion of Canada, despite Canada’s lack of interest in being included.

Benjamin Franklin asked the British to hand Canada over during negotiations for the Treaty of Paris in 1783. Just imagine what that might have done for Canadian healthcare and gun laws! Or don’t imagine it. Britain did hand over Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana. (At least they know they’re free!)

In 1812 the U.S. proposed to march into Canada and be welcomed as liberators. They weren’t. But the Canadians didn’t burn the White House. That was done by British troops that included men recently escaped from U.S. slavery. Killing some of those escapees is celebrated in the U.S. National Anthem, as is the fact that during a battle in which people died, a flag survived.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Russia Exposes British Lies on Skripal, but Trail Leads to US

April 21, 2018

Russia Exposes British Lies on Skripal, but Trail Leads to US

Moscow says it has proof that the agent used in the UK attack is a chemical weapon patented in the US. So was this a covert operation aimed at ratcheting up tensions between the West and Russia?

The sensational case of the poisoning of the ex-MI6 agent and former Russian military intelligence colonel Sergei Skripal on March 4 in Salisbury, in the UK, is becoming more and more curious. Under a blinding spotlight from Moscow, the British allegation regarding a Russian hand in the poisoning of Skripal is getting exposed. An engrossing plot in big-power politics is also unfolding. There is stuff here for a Le Carre novel.

Are we witnessing a replay of the false flag Gulf of Tonkin attack of August 1964, the imaginary “incident” concocted by the US military to provide legal and political justification for deploying American forces in South Vietnam and for commencing open warfare against North Vietnam?

To recap, Britain alleged without any empirical evidence that a military grade nerve agent of a type known as Novichok was used in Salisbury, saying it was originally developed in the former Soviet Union, and therefore, Moscow’s hand – possibly, even President Vladimir Putin’s hand – was “highly likely”.

Moscow has maintained, on the other hand, that it had destroyed all its chemical weapons and an Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) investigation verified and testified to that.

The British allegation quickly morphed into a large-scale expulsion of Russian diplomats (over 100 of them) by western capitals, under heavy pressure from Washington and London. The US alone expelled 60 Russian diplomats, while Britain expelled 23.

Egg on May’s face

Britain is studiously ignoring the Russian requests for samples of the chemical agent used in the Salisbury attack and for consular access to be granted to the former spy’s daughter Yulia. Meanwhile, Britain instead approached the OPCW to investigate.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Putin Warns Russian Students Living In Britain: “Come Home Immediately”

April 20, 2018

Putin Warns Russian Students Living In Britain: “Come Home Immediately”

Facing the “noticeable negative impact of Russophobic attitudes,” Russian authorities have launched a campaign aimed at bringing home young people studying in the UK and other Western countries.

As The Express reports, Olga Evko – a representative of Rossotrudnichestvo, the Federal Agency for the Commonwealth of Independent States, Compatriots Living Abroad and International Humanitarian Cooperation – is behind Moscow’s “It’s time to go home” returnee scheme:

“The question for our youngsters studying abroad is very serious indeed.

“We have real grounds to worry that young Russians may suffer in provocations in countries that show an unfriendly attitude to (us).”

And guess where those overseas students can go when they get back to mother Russia?

Oleg Mansurov, of PreActum entrepreneurial community, told a Moscow conference on the plan that those with education and work experience in Britain “will be ready to take part in ambitious projects and move again, including to the Far East of Russia”.

Yes, Siberia!

Vladimir Putin is seeking to radically boost the economy of eastern Siberia and Russia’s Pacific rim to counter the negative impact of Western sanctions by expanding gas and oil production, gold and diamond mining, as well as nuclear energy and the digital economy.

As The Express notes, the initiative was ridiculed on social media.

Yana Prigozhina said: “I just can’t stop laughing. People who invested so much time in the often an incredibly hard step of moving to study abroad are supposed to buy the idea of ‘building the digital economy’ in the Far East of Russia?”

Referring to a former Gulag transit point in eastern Siberia, Maria G asked sarcastically “Why don’t I just swap my PhD in Cambridge for a job in Magadan?

The British embassy was quoted saying “as ever” Russians were welcome in the UK as students or tourists.

Behind Theresa May’s ‘Humanitarian Hysterics’: The Ideology of Empire and Conquest

April 19, 2018

Behind Theresa May’s ‘Humanitarian Hysterics’: The Ideology of Empire and Conquest

Photo by EU2017EE Estonian Presidency | CC BY 2.0

Until the 17th century, India was the richest country in the world and had controlled a third of global wealth. Political unity and military security helped evolve a uniform economic system, increased trade and enhanced agricultural productivity. Once the British has colonised India and left, it was a basket case.

Indian politician and writer Shashi Kapoor has documented the state the British left India in. They looted the country and the British legacy was 16 per cent literacy, a life expectancy of 27, practically no domestic industry and over 90 per cent living below the poverty line.

Once Britain lost its empire, it managed to secure a degree of global influence by throwing in its lot with the US as a junior partner in Washington’s quest for global hegemony. And if the 21st century tells us anything so far, it is that the centuries’ old colonialist mentality of the British state has not gone away: the mindset of Empire, conquest and duplicity persists.

In 2015, the then UK prime minister David Cameron said he felt deeply moved by the image of a Syrian boy dead on a Turkish beach. As pressure mounted on the UK to take in more of those fleeing to Europe from Syria and other war zones, Cameron added that the UK would fulfil its “moral responsibilities.”

On hearing Cameron’s words about ‘morality’, how many would not have failed to detect the hypocrisy? According to former French foreign minister Roland Dumas, Britain had planned covert action in Syria as early as 2009. And writing in The Guardian in 2013, Nafeez Ahmed discussed leaked emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, including notes from a meeting with Pentagon officials, that confirmed US-UK training of Syrian opposition forces since 2011 aimed at eliciting “collapse” of Assad’s regime “from within.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Chemical Weapons Hypocrisy

April 15, 2018

Chemical Weapons Hypocrisy

Oh, the hypocrisy of it. The ignoble aims. The distraction. The outrageous lies and excuses.

I’m not talking about America’s tweet-from-the-hip president and his desire to escape from the cops’ raid on his lawyer’s office – there’s a Russian connection, all right.

And I’m not talking about his latest sleaze. Life with Melania might not be great at the moment. More distracting to sit with the generals and ex-generals and talk tough about Russia and Syria.

I’m not talking about Theresa May, who wants to step out of the Brexit ditch with any distractions of her own: Salisbury attacks, Douma – even Trump. So Trump telephoned Macron, when the poor lady thought she’d won his hand. What is this nonsense?

Macron has now hitched his own wagon to the Saudis against Iranian “expansionism” – and no doubt arms sales to the Kingdom have something to do with it. But how sad that the desire of young French presidents to act like Napoleon (I can think of a few others) means that they devote themselves to joining in a war, rather than pleading against it.

Now we have our spokespersons and ministers raging about the need to prevent the “normalisation” of chemical warfare, to prevent it becoming a part of ordinary warfare, a return to the terrible days of the First World War.

This does not mean any excuses for the Syrian government – though I suspect, having seen Russia’s Syrian involvement with my own eyes, that Putin might have been getting impatient about ending the war and wanted to eradicate those in the last tunnels of Douma rather than wait through more weeks of fighting. Remember the cruelty of Grozny.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The US Empire Has Been Trying To Regime Change Syria Since Long Before 2011

April 14, 2018

The US Empire Has Been Trying To Regime Change Syria Since Long Before 2011

One interesting and completely undeniable fact that we don’t talk about nearly enough is how Syria has been a target for regime change by the US-centralized power establishment since long before the uprising in 2011.

Proponents of US military interventionism in Syria will avoid addressing this known fact like the plague. They’re more than happy to dispute claims about false flags and the White Helmets, but if you start asking them “Hey don’t you think it’s a little odd that the government we’re all freaking out about right now just so happens to be one that’s been a target for regime change by US defense and intelligence agencies since long before any of this started?” they get real squirmy all of a sudden.

It’s true though. Let’s go over five key items in the mountain of evidence for this, starting with the most recent and working our way backward:

1. The Roland Dumas statement.

Roland Dumas is the former Foreign Minister of France, and he stated that he was made aware of the violence in Syria in 2009, two years before it started.

“I’m going to tell you something,” Dumas said on French station LCP. “I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business. I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria. This was in Britain not in America. Britain was organizing an invasion of rebels into Syria. They even asked me, although I was no longer minister for foreign affairs, if I would like to participate. Naturally, I refused, I said I’m French, that doesn’t interest me.’’

‘’This operation goes way back. It was prepared, preconceived and planned,” Dumas added.

Prepared, preconceived, and planned.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Oceania, ‘Tis For Thee: The World of ‘1984’ Forming Now

April 7, 2018

Oceania, ‘Tis For Thee: The World of ‘1984’ Forming Now

“Oceania” was a nation described in George Orwell’s “1984” as being comprised of Britain (called “Airstrip One,”) and the United States. There were two other superpowers, namely Eurasia and Eastasia. Other lands rich in resources were contested over, such as Africa and assumingly South America…lands never kept by any of three Super-states for any significant period. The “flux” in conquests was exactly what the MIC (Military Industrial Complex) of our time would have termed “necessary” to justify large expenditures: War as the focal purpose, rather than the exceptional event.

We see a parallel in today’s world with huge defense budgets and troop deployments keeping the contracts on the move and siphoning off a considerable amount of national revenues to keep the patriotic war machines moving…respective of each nation. The psychology: keep the population agitated and on a continual war-footing, using a “threat” (either real, created, or imagined) to accomplish this.

You are witnessing the final alignment of those spheres of influence that are almost identical to the novel that Orwell wrote. Look at the situation with the alleged Russian poisoning of an intelligence operative and his daughter in Britain. The United States showed “solidarity” with Great Britain by expelling 60 Russian diplomats and closed the Russian consulate in Seattle, Washington. Russia countered by ordering the expulsion of an equal amount of American embassy personnel.

Yet the interesting fact is that the other nations who followed suit in the “humanitarian crusade” of the alleged Russian poisoning of former FSB agent Skripal and his daughter? The poisoning may have been done by the British, not the Russians. The U.S. State Department has made several statements to the tune that the Russians do not “see eye to eye with us or share our values of freedom and democracy.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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