{"id":5599,"date":"2015-02-12T07:08:32","date_gmt":"2015-02-12T12:08:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=5599"},"modified":"2015-02-12T07:08:32","modified_gmt":"2015-02-12T12:08:32","slug":"the-butlerian-carnival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=5599","title":{"rendered":"The Butlerian Carnival"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Butlerian Carnival<\/a><\/h3>\n

Over the last week or so, I\u2019ve heard from a remarkable number of people who feel that a major crisis is in the offing. The people in question don\u2019t know each other, many of them have even less contact with the mass media than I do, and the sense they\u2019ve tried to express to me is inchoate enough that they\u2019ve been left fumbling for words, but they all end up reaching for the same metaphors: that something in the air just now seems reminiscent of the American colonies in 1775, France in 1789, America in 1860, Europe in 1914, or the world in 1939: a sense of being poised on the brink of convulsive change, with the sound of gunfire and marching boots coming ever more clearly from the dimly seen abyss ahead.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not an unreasonable feeling, all things considered. In Washington DC, Obama\u2019s flunkies are beating the war drums over Ukraine, threatening to send shipments of allegedly \u201cdefensive\u201d weapons to join the mercenaries and military advisors we\u2019ve already not-so-covertly got over there. Russian officials have responded to American saber-rattling by stating flatly that a US decision to arm Kiev will be the signal for all-out war. The current Ukrainian regime, installed by a US-sponsored coup and backed by NATO, means to Russia precisely what a hostile Canadian government installed by a Chinese-sponsored coup and backed by the People\u2019s Liberation Army would mean to the United States; if Obama\u2019s trademark cluelessness leads him to ignore that far from minor point and decide that the Russians are bluffing, we could be facing a European war within weeks.<\/p>\n

Head south and west from the fighting around Donetsk, and another flashpoint is heating up toward an explosion of its own just now. Yes, that would be Greece, where the new Syriza government has refused to back down from the promises that got it into office: promises that center on the rejection of the so-called \u201causterity\u201d policies that have all but destroyed the Greek economy since they were imposed in 2009.\u00a0\u00a0This shouldn\u2019t be news to anyone; those same policies, though they\u2019ve been praised to the skies by neoliberal economists for decades now as a guaranteed ticket to prosperity, have had precisely the opposite effect in every single country where they\u2019ve been put in place.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Butlerian Carnival Over the last week or so, I\u2019ve heard from a remarkable number of people who feel that a major crisis is in the offing. The people in question don\u2019t know each other, many of them have even less contact with the mass media than I do, and the sense they\u2019ve tried to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[3463,181,919,1758,1610,553,685,3464,821,865],"class_list":["post-5599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-archdruid-report","tag-crisis","tag-donetsk","tag-john-michael-greer","tag-kiev","tag-nato","tag-revolution","tag-rusia-china","tag-ukraine","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5599"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5600,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5599\/revisions\/5600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}