"The Global South Rising (Up)" by Natasha Wright

 

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 The Global South Rising (Up)

Natasha Wright

January 31, 2023

Davos annual meeting comes across as rather outdated and obsolete with its now heavily tarnished global image all the more so.

While geopolitics is threatening to deal a heavy blow and most probably demolish the world created in the cauldrons of Davos, as has the Financial Times voiced their concerns, and surely not without a series of justifiable reasons, one of the unexpected leaders of the Global South, Indian PM Narenda Modi, rebelliously self-confident, said in his address to the world: “Our time is yet to come. We are all those who are not the Collective West ‘made to Davos measure”. Moreover, even the U.S. CNN couldn’t help noticing, this year’s Davos meeting (aka the Davos annual “gab fest” as Rowan Dean, Sky News Australia famously called it) has attracted a record number of visits but its relevance appears to be dwindling and slowly but surely vanishing into political void. Davos annual meeting comes across as rather outdated and obsolete with its now heavily tarnished global image all the more so.

The overwhelming fear this year’s WEF in Davos is frantically obsessing about internalizes the fact that the long-lasting period of peace and prosperity and global economic integrations is regrettably drawing to an end – not even the Financial Times try to handle the perils of their own pessimism in that they seem to specify to the smallest minutiae, who did prosper in that famous and infamous Collective West in the period of global integration, which has existed so far but is in a terribly precarious position now.

The conflict in Ukraine has shown the ways the war can suddenly sever the ties in economic relations on the foundations of which the globalization has been built so far. The European Union seems to be drastically reducing the import of Russian energy supplies and in so doing it further foments the inflation in Europe and renders some of its industries grotesquely uncompetitive and regrettably redundant. The politicians and industrial moguls are now casting scrutinizing looks along the horizon and beyond, in their comically concerted effort to possibly spot the next ominously pernicious threat. It sounds only too eerie that the London-based newspaper forecasts with a proverbial admonishing finger in midair. The U.S. channel says that this year in Davos, one cannot help noticing the absence of U.S. President Biden, the French President Emanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on one hand and the leaders of India and China Xi and Modi on the other. Some of them were obliged not to attend because of the backlash on their home turfs because Davos has become the toxic symbol of inequality and brutally merciless international capitalism.

There is surely a very good reason for this tarnished reputation, because in the last two years apparently, 1% of the richest of the rich have accumulated even two times bigger “new riches” than the rest of the world altogether. Those leaders who believe this is “not OK” such as Xi and Modi, did not attend Davos because they were otherwise engaged and they had to prioritize. But to get back to truly serious world leaders, PM Modi was absent for a good reason because instead of WEF, he addressed his audience in the Voice of the Global South Summit. Unlike that overwhelmingly pathetic pessimism in Davos, Modi’s voice was brimming with rebellious optimism. It is blatantly obvious that the world is in the grip of the global crisis. It is difficult to foresee how long this state of uncertainty will last – Modi started his elaboration and then went on to get across what is to come next. “We shall have the biggest share in this in the future. Three quarters of mankind live in our countries and we need to have an impact commensurate with that share and number. Therefore, whilst the eight decade long global governance behind us is gradually changing, we need to aspire to shape the emerging world order. The peoples and nations in the global South should not be deprived of the fruits of the global development out of purely selfish reasons. It is incumbent on all of us together to reconstruct our common political and financial governance. Only that can multiply our opportunities and increase prosperity”. All that, Modi points out, may happen with the respect for all nations, rule of law and peaceable resolution of all differences and disputes and the reform of international institutions, including that of the UN, so as to render them more relevant.

By the way, Russia has publicly supported this request by India to be granted the continual seat in the UN Security Council. “Despite the challenges the world is facing I remain an optimist,” Modi sends a clear resounding message. “Our time is coming. In the past century we have been helping each other in our struggle against foreign governance. We can do that again in this century so as to create the new world order, which will in turn ensure the well – being of our citizens” – says Modi. And not only him. An almost identical message was sent from Cairo, Egypt. After a meeting with the Arab League officials, the new Chinese foreign minister Qin Gang said “We have agreed to work together towards creating the new world order based on the rule of law and equality of the whole humanity, dedication to human values of the whole civilization together with their adamant refusing to politicize human rights issues and their (ab)use as a mere political ploy to interfere in the internal affairs of individual sovereign countries.” He did not utter this out loud and there was no need to do any such thing other than in this Qin Gang’s filigree diplomatic style, though it was blatantly obvious who Qin Gang was referring to.

Truth be told, the clear signs of the new non-Western world order are rapidly proliferating. Not only that 85 % of mankind have not joined “the Collective Biden” sanctions against Russia but as an example, thanks to these sanctions, India is now importing 33 times more from Russia than before. Iran, regardless of the U.S. sanctions on them, is now exporting more of its oil than before the sanctions. And the Republic of South Africa, as one very good but a somewhat different example, is dismissing the raging wrath expressed by the Collective West because of their (i.e. South African) marine military exercises with Russia recently. But as its key point, after Xi Jinping announced in Ryadh recently that China will be paying Saudi Arabia for Saudi oil in yuan, the Saudi Finance Minister confirms with a dollop of irony from Davos that the situation is abundantly clear that they will not sell oil exclusively in U.S. dollars. And, South African Minister of Foreign Affairs, Naledi Pandor reveals that more or less since 2014 the BRICS countries have been working hard on creating an alternative to the dollar system. All the projections tend to indicate that by 2030 China and India economies will be the biggest economies in the world and Russia will graciously overtake the economies of Germany and Japan.

The new world order is not a mere buzzword for the idle ones any more. One cannot but wonder who will shape it and in what manner: economically, financially and politically. Will the Collective West do their diabolical best to prevent that from happening by resorting to what they have always done: the truly global world war and possibly aided with nukes?

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

"Why the western media is afraid of Julian Assange" by Jonathan Cook

  

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Why the western media is afraid of Julian Assange

30 January 2023

[This is the text of my talk at #FreeTheTruth: Secret Power, Media Freedom and Democracy, held at St Pancras Church, London, on Saturday 28 January 2023. Other speakers were former British ambassador Craig Murray and Italian investigative journalist Stefania Maurizi, author of the recent Secret Power: Wikileaks and its Enemies.

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn also presented the Gavin MacFayden award, the only media prize voted on by whistleblowers, to Julian Assange for being “the journalist whose work most exemplifies the importance of a free press”. Craig Murray accepted it on Assange’s behalf. Video of the event is embedded in the text below.]

 

During an interview back in 2011, Julian Assange made an acute observation about the role of what he called society’s “perceived moral institutions”, such as liberal media:

What drives a paper like the Guardian or New York Times is not their inner moral values. It is simply that they have a market. In the UK, there is a market called “educated liberals”. Educated liberals want to buy a newspaper like the Guardian, and therefore an institution arises to fulfil that market. … What is in the newspaper is not a reflection of the values of the people in that institution, it is a reflection of the market demand.

Assange presumably gained this insight after working closely the previous year with both newspapers on the Afghan and Iraq war logs.

One of the mistakes we typically make about the so-called “mainstream media” is imagining that its outlets evolved in some kind of gradual bottom-up process. We are encouraged to assume that there is at least an element of voluntary association in how media publications form.

At its simplest, we imagine that journalists with a liberal or leftwing outlook gravitate towards other journalists with a similar outlook and together they produce a liberal-left newspaper. We sometimes imagine that something similar takes place among rightwing journalists and rightwing newspapers.

All of this requires ignoring the elephant in the room: billionaire owners. Even if we think about those owners – and in general we are discouraged from doing so – we tend to suppose that their role is chiefly to provide the funding for these free exercises in journalistic collaboration.

For that reason, we infer that the media represents society: it offers a market place of thought and expression in which ideas and opinions align with how the vast majority of people feel. In short, the media reflects a spectrum of acceptable ideas rather than defining and imposing that spectrum.

Dangerous ideas

Of course, if we pause to think about it, those assumptions are ludicrous. The media consists of outlets owned by, and serving the interests of, billionaires and large corporations – or in the case of the BBC, a broadcasting corporation entirely reliant on state largesse.

Furthermore, almost all corporate media needs advertising revenue from other large corporations to avoid haemorrhaging money. There is nothing bottom-up about this arrangement. It is entirely top-down.

Journalists operate within ideological parameters strictly laid down by their outlet’s owner. The media doesn’t reflect society. It reflects the interests of a small elite, and the national security state that promotes and protects that elite.

Those parameters are wide enough to allow some disagreement – just enough to make western media look democratic. But the parameters are narrow enough to restrict reporting, analysis and opinion so that dangerous ideas – dangerous to corporate-state power – almost never get a look-in. Put bluntly, media pluralism is the spectrum of allowable thought among the power-elite.

If this doesn’t seem obvious, it might help to think of media outlets more like any other large corporation – like a supermarket chain, for example.

Supermarkets are large warehouse-like venues, stocking a wide range of goods, a range similar across all chains, but distinguished by minor variations in pricing and branding.

Despite this essential similarity, each supermarket chain markets itself as radically different from its rivals. It is easy to fall for this pitch, and most of us do: to the extent that we start to identify with one supermarket over the others, believing it shares our values, it embodies our ideals, it aspires to things we hold dear.

We all know there is a difference between Waitrose and Tesco in the UK, or Whole Foods and Walmart in the US. But if we try to identify what that difference amounts to, it is hard to know – beyond competing marketing strategies and the targeting of different shopping audiences.

All the supermarkets share a core capitalist ideology. All are pathologically driven by the need to generate profits. All try to fuel rapacious consumerism among their customers. All create excessive demand and waste. All externalise their costs on to the wider society.

Capturing readers

Media publications are much the same. They are there to do essentially the same thing, but they can only monetise their similarity by presenting – marketing – it as difference. They brand differently not because they are different, but because to be effective (if not always profitable) they must reach and capture different demographics.

Supermakets do it through different emphases: is it Coca-Cola or wine that serves as a loss-leader? Should green credentials and animal welfare be accentuated over value for money? It’s no different with the media: outlets brand themselves as liberal or conservative, on the side of the middle class or the unskilled worker, as challenging the powerful or respectful of them.

The key task of a supermarket is to create loyalty from a section of the shopping public to stop those customers straying to other chains. Similarly, a media outlet reinforces a supposed set of shared values among a specific demographic to stop readers from looking elsewhere for their news, analysis and commentary.

The goal of the corporate media is not unearthing truth. It is not monitoring the centres of power. It is about capturing readers. In so far as a media outlet does monitor power, does speak difficult truths, it is because that is its brand, that is what its audience has come to expect from it.

‘Proper’ journalists

So how does this relate to today’s topic?

Well, not least it helps clarify something that baffles many of us. Why haven’t journalists risen up to support Julian Assange in their droves – especially once Sweden dropped the longest preliminary investigation in its history and it became clear that Assange’s persecution was, as he always warned, paving the way to his extradition to the US for exposing its war crimes?

The truth is that, were the Guardian and the New York Times clamouring for Assange’s freedom;

had they investigated the glaring holes in the Swedish case, as Nils Melzer, the UN’s special rapporteur on torture, did;

were they screaming about the dangers of allowing the US to redefine journalism’s core task as treason under the draconian, century-old Espionage Act;

had they used their substantial muscle and resources to pursue Freedom of Information requests, as Stefania Maurizi did on her own dime;

were they pointing out the endless legal abuses taking place in Assange’s treatment in the UK;

had they reported – rather than ignored – the facts that came to light in the extradition hearings in London;

in short, had they kept Assange’s persecution constantly in the spotlight, he would be free by now.

The efforts by the various states involved to gradually disappear him over the past decade would have become futile, even self-sabotaging.

At some level, journalists understand this. Which is precisely why they try to persuade themselves, and you, that Assange isn’t a “proper” journalist. That’s why, they tell themselves, they don’t need to show solidarity with a fellow journalist – or worse, why it is okay to amplify the security state’s demonisation campaign.

By ignoring Assange, by othering him, they can avoid thinking about the differences between what he has done and what they do. Journalists can avoid examining their own role as captured servants of corporate power.

Media revolution

Assange faces 175 years in a maximum-security prison, not for espionage but for publishing journalism. Journalism doesn’t require some special professional qualification, as brain surgery and conveyancing do. It does not depend on precise, abstruse knowledge of human physiology or legal procedure.

At its best, journalism is simply gathering and publishing information that serves the “public interest”. Public: that is, it serves you and me. It does not require a diploma. It does not require a big building, or a wealthy owner. Whisper it: any of us can do journalism. And when we do, journalistic protections should apply.

Assange excelled at journalism like no one before him because he devised a new model for forcing governments to become more transparent, and public servants more honest. Which is precisely why the elite who wield secret power want him and that model destroyed.

If the liberal media was really organised from the bottom-up rather than the top-down, journalists would be incensed – and terrified – by states torturing one of their own. They would be genuinely afraid that they might be targeted next.

Because it is the practice of pure journalism that is under attack, not a single journalist.

But that isn’t how corporate journalists see it. And truth be told, their abandonment of Assange – the lack of solidarity – is explicable. Journalists aren’t being entirely irrational.

The corporate media, especially its liberal outlets and their journalist-servants, understand that Assange’s media revolution – embodied by Wikileaks – is far more of a threat to them than the national security state.

Difficult home truths

Wikileaks offers a new kind of platform for democratic journalism in which secret power, along with its inherent corruptions and crimes, becomes much harder to wield. And as a result, corporate journalists have had to face some difficult home truths they had avoided till Wikileaks’ appearance.

First, the Wikileaks media revolution threatens to undermine the role and privileges of the corporate journalist. Readers no longer have to depend on these well-paid “arbiters of truth”. For the first time, readers have direct access to the original sources, to the unmediated documents.

Readers no longer have to be passive consumers of news. They can inform themselves. Not only can they cut out the middle man – the corporate media – but they can finally assess whether that middle man has been entirely straight with them.

That is very bad news for individual corporate journalists. At best, it strips them of any aura of authority and prestige. At worst, it ensures that a profession already held in low esteem is seen as even less trustworthy.

But it is also very bad news for media owners. They no longer control the news agenda. They can no longer serve as institutional gatekeepers. They can no longer define the limits of acceptable ideas and opinion.

Access journalism

Second, the Wikileaks revolution sheds an unflattering light on the traditional model of journalism. It shows it to be inherently dependent on – and therefore complicit with – secret power.

The lifeblood of the Wikileaks model is the whistleblower, who risks eveything to get out public-interest information the powerful want concealed because it reveals corruption, abuse or lawbreaking. Think Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.

The lifeblood of corporate journalism, by contrast, is access. Corporate journalists make an implicit transaction: the insider delivers selected snippets of information to the journalist that may or may not be true and that invariably serve the interests of unseen forces in the corridors of power.

For both sides, the relationship of access depends on not antagonising power by exposing its deep secrets.

The insider is only useful to the journalist so long as he or she has access to power. Which means that the insider is rarely going to offer up information that truly threatens that power. If they did, they would soon be out of a job.

But to be considered useful, the insider needs to offer to the reporter information that appears to be revelatory, that holds out the promise for the journalist of career advancement and prizes.

Both sides are playing a role in a game of charades that serves the joint interests of the corporate media and and political elite.

At best, access offers insights for journalists into the power plays between rival elite groups with conflicting agendas – between the more liberal elements of the power elite and the more hawkish elements.

The public interest is invariably served in only the most marginal way: we get a partial sense of the divisions within an administration or a bureaucracy, but very rarely the full extent of what is going on.

For a brief period, the liberal components of the corporate media swapped out their historic access to join Wikileaks in its transparency revolution. But they quickly understood the dangers of the path they were embarking on – as the quote from Assange we began with makes clear.

Mind and muscle

It would be a big mistake to assume that the corporate media feels threatened by Wikileaks simply because the latter has made a much better fist of holding power to account than the corporate media. This isn’t about envy. It’s about fear. In reality, Wikileaks does exactly what the corporate media wishes not to do.

Journalists ultimately serve the interests of media owners and advertisers. These corporations are the concealed power running our societies. In addition to owning the media, they fund the politicians and finance the think tanks that so often dictate the news and policy agenda. Our governments declare these corporations, especially those dominating the financial sector, too big to fail. Because power in our societies is corporate power.

The pillars upholding this system of secret elite power – those disguising and protecting it – are the media and the security services: the mind and the muscle. The media corporations are there to protect corporate power using psychological and emotional manipulation, just as the security services are there to protect it using invasive surveillance and physical coercion.

Wikileaks disrupts this cosy relationship from both ends. It threatens to end the role of the corporate media in mediating official information, instead offering the public direct access to official secrets. And in so doing, it dares to expose the tradecraft of the security services as they go about their lawbreaking and abuses, and thereby impose unwelcome scrutiny and restraint on them.

In threatening to bring democratic accountability to the media and the security services, and exposing their long-standing collusion, Wikileaks opens a window on how sham our democracies truly are.

The shared desire of the security services and the corporate media is to disappear Assange in the hope that his revolutionary model of journalism is abandoned or forgotten for good.

It won’t be. The technology is not going away. And we must keep reminding the world of what Assange accomplished, and the terrible price he paid for his achievement.

Source: Jonathan Cook Blog

"Edward Carpenter: an organic radical inspiration" from orgrad

  

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Edward Carpenter: an organic radical inspiration

The latest in our series of profiles from the orgrad website.

“If each man remained in organic adhesion to the general body of his fellows no serious dis-harmony could occur”

Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) was a philosopher, writer and poet who fought for organic libertarian socialism and against industrial capitalism.

He is further remembered as one of the early English campaigners for gay rights.

Carpenter was influenced by John Ruskin and Henry David Thoreau. He belonged to Henry Salt’s Humanitarian League and to the Social Democratic Federation alongside William Morris.

He also worked with Peter Kropotkin and helped the Walsall anarchists, who were set up for prosecution on bomb-making charges in 1892 by a Special Branch agent provocateur.

Carpenter was a forthright critic of modern industrial civilization and condemned “the artificial life, of houses and cities” (1) in which people were cut off from nature and from each other.

He wrote in ‘England’s Ideal’, first published in 1884: “The moment one comes to look into the heart of modern society one perceives how essentially unclean it is – how, after all, the pervading aim and effort of personal life, either consciously or unconsciously entertained, is to maintain ourselves at the cost of others – to live at the expense of other folk’s labor, without giving an equivalent of our own labor in return – and if this is not dishonesty I don’t know what is!” (2)

In his 1921 book Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure, Carpenter declared that modern civilisation was “a kind of disease”. (3)

He identified the increase of money and private property as having destroyed the health of the “old community of life and enjoyment” (4) – the natural organic society that Ferdinand Tönnies termed Gemeinschaft.

Carpenter wrote: “The growth of wealth, it is shown, and with it the conception of private property, brought on certain very definite new forms of social life; it destroyed the ancient system of society based upon the gens, that is, a society of equals founded upon blood-relationship, and introduced a society of classes founded upon differences of material possession; it destroyed the ancient system of mother-right and inheritance through the female line, and turned the woman into the property of the man; it brought with it private ownership of land, and so created a class of landless aliens, and a whole system of rent, mortgage, interest, etc; it introduced slavery, serfdom and wage-labor, which are only various forms of the dominance of one class over another; and to rivet these authorities it created the State and the policeman”. (5)

Under capitalist society, everyone tried to grab as much as they could for themselves. Private accumulations arose and artificial barriers of law had to be constructed in order to preserve the unequal levels of wealth. Force had to be used by the possessors in order to maintain the law-barriers against the non-possessors “and finally the formal Government arises, mainly as the expression of such force”. (6)

He added: “This is no true Democracy. Here in this ‘each for himself’ is no rule of the Demos in every man, nor anything resembling it. Here is no solidarity such as existed in the ancient tribes and primaeval society, but only disintegration and a dust-heap”. (7)

Carpenter saw a healthy society as one which was whole, pointing out that the two adjectives shared the same roots and fundamentally described the same idea.

He wrote: “The idea seems to be a positive one – a condition of the body in which it is an entirety, a unity – a central force maintaining that condition; and disease being the break-up – or break-down – of that entirety into multiplicity”. (8)

The disease inflicted on the social organism by industrial society therefore represented “the break-up of its unity, its entirety, into multiplicity” (9) and the “consumption of the organism by masses of social parasites”. (10)

Carpenter added: “It is clear enough that if our social life were really vivid and healthy, such parasitic products as the idle shareholder and the aforementioned policeman would simply be impossible.

“The material on which they prey would not exist, and they would either perish or be transmuted into useful forms. It seems obvious in fact that life in any organism can only be maintained by some such processes as these – by which parasitic or infesting organisms are either thrown off or absorbed into subjection. (11)

“Accordingly we find that it has been the work of Civilisation – founded as we have seen on Property – in every way to disintegrate and corrupt man – literally to corrupt – to break up the unity of his nature”. (12)

In response to all this, Carpenter suggested that the modern person had to rediscover themself as “the free child of Nature” (13) which they had been meant to be.

To be true to this inner nature, a man had to cherish “his organic relation with the whole body of his fellows” (14) because it was this which held an anarchic natural society together.

When that organic order-from-below was gone, the door was opened to the alleged need for a state to come in and impose order-from-above.

Carpenter wrote: “If each man remained in organic adhesion to the general body of his fellows no serious dis-harmony could occur; but it is when this vital unity of the body politic becomes weak that it has to be preserved by artificial means, and thus it is that with the decay of the primitive and instinctive social life there springs up a form of government which is no longer the democratic expression of the life of the whole people; but a kind of outside authority and compulsion thrust upon them by a ruling class or caste”. (15)

Video link: TV report 1980s (9 mins)

1. Edward Carpenter, Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure, and other essays (London: Allen & Unwin, 1921), p. 28.
2. Edward Carpenter, England’s Ideal and other papers on social subjects (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1919), pp. 3-4.
3. Carpenter, Civilisation, p. 1.
4. Carpenter, Civilisation, p. 30.
5. Carpenter, Civilisation, pp. 4-5.
6. Carpenter, Civilisation, p. 30.
7. Carpenter, Civilisation, p. 33.
8. Carpenter, Civilisation, p. 12.
9. Carpenter, Civilisation, p. 16.
10. Carpenter, Civilisation, pp. 2-3.
11. Carpenter, Civilisation, pp. 16-17.
12. Carpenter, Civilisation, pp. 25-26.
13. Carpenter, Civilisation, p. 26.
14. Carpenter, Civilisation, p. 28.
15. Carpenter, Civilisation, p. 31.

Source: Winter Oak

"World War E: Levels Deep on Psyops" by Mathew Crawford

  

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World War E: Levels Deep on Psyops

The Wars of Wars Part 8

MATHEW CRAWFORD JAN 31

SAVE ▷  LISTEN

Other RTE articles about the Wars of Wars can be found here.

Twitter is lit up with videos of what might be an Israeli attack on Iran in conjunction with Iranian internal struggles. Understand that I don't plan to comment at a level of trying to sort out the facts because I don't know an interesting set of specifics. However, I do have something to say about the Bigger Picture.

Vogue's Depressed Under 30 @mynameprada

Live Update: Worrisome, Strange Situation in #Iran (attack of drones, earthquake, sabotage, - espionage, etc) *hint: 9 or 10 hours from now Blinken will meet Bibi Netanyahu in Tel Aviv. Not yet comment from Turkiye, Israel, Russia. prada.substack.com/p/live-update-…

Erfan Fard@EQfard

מטוסי קרב בשמי טהרן.. #إيران #اصفهان #انفجار #Tabriz Locals say government buildings in #Tehran have been attacked #Explosions allegedly reported across NW & Central #Iran : - Isfahan, - Khoy, W. Azerbaijan - Azarshahr,Tabriz - Karaj, Alborz - Narmak - Hamadan https://t.co/FtE0KLMldU https://t.co/F5Fs9IR27q

2:04 AM ∙ Jan 29, 2023

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Stepping Back to 9/11 and the Endless Wars in the Middle East

Let us set aside for the moment all the substantial details laid out by Richard Gage and others that make 9/11 look like something more than we were told. It is likely that any one of us has some details wrong, and lacks elements of the Bigger Picture—unless Dubya's reading, in which case I just want to leave this here.

What I'd like to talk about is what happened next: War in the Middle East. And then I'd like to see if we can work from there to the present. So, here goes…

They sold us war. Many of us did not want it. Some who thought they wanted it later came to regret their support. So, what happened?

Psyop Level 1: We're going to get the terrorists. And WMDs.

Many a patriotic young American found himself or herself in a recruiting office, ready to protect America from foreign enemies. Some came home in body bags or with missing limbs—you might ask if that last part was an experiment to test weapons and countermeasures.

We did not find WMDs. We might have trained up some terrorists ourselves, but that's a deep topic for another day.

Obligatory reminder: Big Pharma is on trial for funding terrorism in the Middle East based on activities during the Forever Wars.

Psyop Level 2: Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are stealing liquid black gold for American oiligarchs (part b: rare earth metals).

Despite many real ties between the Dick n' Bush regime and the oil industry, and a "Wouldn't it be nice if Santa delivered this to me" list of oil fields in Cheney's hands, the Great Oil Caper never materialized. I'm not saying no money was made on oil by anyone at all, but that didn't foot the $6.5 trillion war bill. Maybe that was due to Western outrage, but I'm headed deeper…

Psyop Level 3: It's about the drug and sex trafficking markets.

Poppies. Bacha bazi. Airports used as lily pads for child sex traffickers and blackmailers out of Southeast Asia. Sure, that happened. And the blackmailers do likely have their hands in present day war games, as Jeffrey Epstein and pals surely could have told you. But the total black market value of the global drug and human trafficking industries since 9/11 does not even reach $6.5 trillion.

The first rule of DoD Fight Club is: don't advertise what you're really working on in shithole nations.

Psyop Level 4: Go off the petrodollar, and we'll kick yer arse!

This one is where I landed for a good long while. And it's tempting. Very tempting. In particular, like Psyop Levels 2 and 3, it's not entirely untrue. From Libya to almost everyone who loses in the grand ole game of Cantillon theft, dollar hegemony is resented—as is only natural.

Level 5: It's About the Post-Dollar Global Economic System

I talked with the man who goes by John Cullen about this today: The Endless wars in the Middle East make more sense as a containment strategy to keep Russia and China from breaking U.S. hegemony at a time when the dollar is weakening and may lose status as the global reserve currency.

https://rumble.com/v27n60e-rte-discussions-21-las-vegas-shooting-w-john-cullen.html

Color Coding:

• Red: China/Russia

• Yellow: Other BRICS nations

• Purple: Ukraine and Syria

• Blue: U.S. and nations where the U.S. military has been active since 9/11.

• Green: U.S. Allies encircling East/Southeast Asia.

On its face, this (Blue-Green-Purple) looks like a containment strategy, and perhaps rent seeking the gas pipeline flows.

Is THAT worth $6.5 trillion?

Yes. Yes, it is. To the military-banking complex, it certainly is—particularly if a lot of that bill is being footed by those they seek to contain.

Rounding the Earth Newsletter

The Cantillon Effect is Currency Slavery

"The more political the topic, the less reliable is Wikipedia." -Mathew's Law Find other Bitcoin Wars articles here. Judging by the standard internet experience, you might think that the Cantillon Effect is an unimportant topic in economics. It's one of those terms that doesn't bring the corresponding Wikipedia entry to the top of the results when you ent…

Read more

6 months ago · 137 likes · 54 comments · Mathew Crawford

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Consolidation of Saudi Arabia

With 320 Saudi princes, ministers, and businessmen arrested and held up at the Ritz-Carlton (Marriott) in Riyadh (a weird coincidence given that Marriott owned World Trade Center 3), Prince Turki bin Modamed bin Fahd fled to Iran in early November 2017. That was days after the death of Prince Mansour bin Murqin in a helicopter crash (intended irony?).

The House of Saud is fueled by Aramco, which is the world's most profitable company, profiting more than $100 billion annually. To put that in perspective, Aramco earns more than four times the profit of China's three largest energy companies, which are themselves three of the five largest corporations in the world by revenue. While the Saudi royals share a pretty fine standard of living, an increasingly large portion of those profits are being invested rapidly in developing other industries to fuel the nation (no pun intended).

Consolidation of power and wealth (MBS confiscating around $200B from the bank accounts of those held up during the purge) allows for Saudi Arabia to act in unison as a rock in the middle of the boundary between the East and West. I mention all this because it supports the model of World War E.

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Correcting the Dots

Focus on the blue areas where U.S. military action took place. Sure, the U.S. handed over Afghanistan ("the graveyard of empires") to China (maybe after training the Taliban *cough*), but otherwise, U.S. involvement seems perfectly strategic in a game of "who controls the spoils of the post-dollar belt and road".

Syria and Ukraine are where the hottest action has taken place. This makes sense if you want to control the gas pipelines, and rent seek your way to dominance in the next era.

I'll leave it to readers to imagine why Russia might want to be involved (in Syria and Ukraine) even aside from the Ukrainian biolabs that seem like a violation of the West's agreement not to encroach. Economically speaking, it behooves Russia to create the shortest border to defend, meaning that movement through Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia are potentially on the menu. And it is unclear whether Finland or Scandinavia could be next if Russia succeeds.

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Class Exercise: Apply What We Have Learned

(To the Plandemonium)

What levels of Psyops have we seen during the plandemonium? (And do you see why I prefer plandemonium to plandemic?)

Level 1: It was zoonosis!

Peter Hotez and his ilk are still clowning this take, but nary an animal has been found anywhere near Wuhan carrying a CoV that resembles SARS-CoV-2.

Level 2: China did it in the Laboratory with the Candlestick.

A laboratory built under a French Health Minister who is mad, mad, mad about vaccines—and slipped Andrew Hill $40 million to mumble and babble about. A laboratory whose chief scientist was trained by Ralph Baric. A laboratory that gives the West a Level 2 fallback plan when the Level 1 debate is allowed to fade.

This too is a joke.

Level 3: It's U.S. Gain of Function research!

A whole lot of people are stuck here right now, and I can understand why. I'll write more about this another time, but recommend reading through the Biowarfare Chronicles for the moment. It seems likely to me that nobody has ever solved all three at once: Engineering,

• A virion that infects humans,

• With added (gained) malicious attributes that are contrary to the long term survival of the lineage, and

• That is replication competent as a quasi-species swarm capable of a problematic pandemic.

Each of these three steps has a low statistical likelihood of success at random, and though science achieved conquering two of the three at once, the probability of nailing all three together (particularly the second two at once) is low for reasons that are both evolutionary based and because the number of ways to get it right gets divided by a denominator that is a filtered four to the 30,000th power, which is an integer with approximately 18,000 digits (which is a number greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe…by a wide margin).

Level 4: (I'll leave this open)

Level 5ish: It's about the military-banking complex.

A U.S. bioweapon attack on the world (even largely the West and itself…curtailing pension and other liabilities ahead of dollar weakening?) is on the table.

One way or another, it's always about the military-banking complex, stupid.

Source: Rounding the Earth Newsletter