We live in two worlds, the real and fake ones.

Money is fake. Or socially constructed if that’s how you prefer it. We’ve all agreed that these pieces of paper matter. Our agreement is strong enough that without money, you will die.

Malaria is real. It will kill you. This isn’t something we have to all agree on. Reality exists outside of our consciousness. Get bit by a mosquito. Die.

You need fake money to solve real problems, for example it costs money to produce, distribute, and acquire anti-malaria medication.

Most of the smartest people are going into the fake world, because it’s [seemingly] Infinite.

Airline pilot or train conductor is more important than Substack’er. By the end of the year, if trends hold up, I’ll be OK from this thing. That’s not fair. It’s not moral. It’s not practical. It is what it is.

People who go into finance have unlimited upside.

Why then would people want to work real jobs, which require mental horsepower and college degrees, when they could work in the fake world of finance, sales, and e-commerce?

IQ tests used to solve this problem.

In the olden days, you didn’t need a college degree to get a real job. You took an IQ test to get a job. In Griggs v. Duke Power Co, the far left wing Supreme Court all but outlawed these tests.

Employers thus started to required college degrees for jobs that a smart and ambitious 19 year old could have begun learning via on-the-job training and a mentorship.

All the smart kids were forced to attend college. Most of them realized, “If I am going to go through all this hassle, I may as well sell insurance for State Farm upon graduation.”

Banning IQ tests for jobs, more than any other policy, hollowed out the middle. Millions of smart kids got left behind. We should care not for their sake, but our own.

The forgotten kids.

Standardized tests (a rough measure of IQ) were given to kids, who were then sorted or tracked into gifted programs.

It was to my own shock, as well as my friends, that I was in the “preppy homeroom” for junior high. I scored well on those tests, even through my grades were always mediocre.

My parents were religious fundamentalists who didn’t put much value on school grades. (Maybe they were right all along.)

Anyway, I got tracked into the more advanced homeroom. This was typical of that era. Identify smart kids who may be in difficult or unusual circumstances, and try to push them up. All of society benefits when you identify and promote the higher IQ.

Now those gifted kids will be forgotten.

We have also agreed to shift resources from identifying greatness for other priorities.

Society doesn’t care, as “flyover people” are seen as not really human.

As infrastructure crumbles, all will pay the piper.

When you put the fake world ahead of the real world.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg worked in the fake world of Harvard and consulting. Consultants do not improve business outcomes. They exist as a way to give cover to an executive team by saying that the executive team’s strategy is the correct one. This also means you can’t fire the executives for failure because the consultants agreed it was the right move.

Where do you suppose “Mayor Pete’s” priorities are?

Roads and train tracks can’t get more real. Polluted water is as real as it gets.

Racial identity politics are part of the fake world. We only get to fight over nonsense when infrastructure is strong enough to support our bloated selves.

The country has decided that the fake world matters more than the real world.

“T.I.V.” comes to U.S.A.

My wife and I lived in Vietnam for a spell. When the internet was down, or the power went out, people would say, “TIV.” That stood for This is Vietnam, in other words shrug your shoulders and accept it.

Vietnam is on the rise, and in twenty years from now, you won’t be saying TIV.

We will be saying TIA.

This is America.

     One has to wonder whether an army of saboteurs is on the loose across the land. Considering the border with Mexico is wide open, why wouldn’t America’s adversaries send whole wrecking crews over here to mess with our infrastructure? There’s no question that people from all over the planet have been sneaking across the Rio Grande. Surely some of them are on a mission. America is filled with “soft” targets, things unguarded and indefensible — not least, tens of thousands of miles of railroad track. Of all the reasons to be unnerved by “Joe Biden’s” open border policy, this one is the least discussed, even in the alt-media. But it seems like a no-brainer for nefarious interests who might want to bamboozle and disable us.

     The sad truth of this moment in history is that the USA has too much going sideways with our own business at home now to be dabbling in any foreign misadventures — and we couldn’t have picked a worse place than Ukraine to do it. The sheer logistics are implausible. The geography is lethally unfavorable. The place has been unarguably within Russia’s sphere of influence for centuries and Russia has every intention of pacifying the joint at all costs. Peace talks are apparently out of the question for our leaders. Something’s got to give, and that something is probably Western Civ’s financial system. It’s primed to blow anyway, and when it does, we’ll have other things to think about. (read more)

Seymour Hersh’s bombshell report on how the United States government blew up the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in the Baltic Sea last September continues to generate rippling geopolitical waves all across the spectrum.

Except, of course, in the parallel bubble of U.S. mainstream media, which has totally ignored it, or in a few select cases, decided to shoot the messenger, dismissing Hersh as a “discredited” journalist, a “blogger”, and a “conspiracy theorist”.

I have offered an initial approach, focused on the plentiful merits of a seemingly thorough report, but also noting some serious inconsistencies.

Old school Moscow-based foreign correspondent John Helmer has gone even further; and what he uncovered may be as incandescent as Sy Hersh’s own narrative.

The heart of the matter in Hersh’s report concerns attribution of responsibility for a de facto industrial terror attack. Surprisingly, no CIA; that falls straight on the toxic planning trio of Sullivan, Blinken and Nuland – neoliberal-cons part of the “Biden” combo. And the final green light comes from the Ultimate Decider: the senile, teleprompt-reading [pretend] President himself. The Norwegians feature as minor helpers.

That poses the first serious problem: nowhere in his narrative Hersh refers to MI6, the Poles (government, Navy), the Danes, and even the German government.

There’s a mention that on January 2022, “after some wobbling”, Chancellor Scholz “was now firmly on the American team”. Well, by now the plan had been under discussion, according to Hersh’s source, for at least a few months. That also means that Scholz remained “on the American team” all the way to the terror attack, on September 2022.

As for the Brits, the Poles and all NATO games being played off Bornhom Island more than a year before the attack, that had been extensively reported by Russian media – from Kommersant to RIA Novosti.

The Special Military Operation (SMO) was launched on February 24, almost a year ago. The Nord Stream 1 and 2 blow up happened on September 26. Hersh assures there were “more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to ‘sabotage the pipelines’”.

So that confirms that the terror attack planning preceded, by months, not only the SMO but, crucially, the letters sent by Moscow to Washington on December 2022, requesting a serious discussion on “indivisibility of security” involving NATO, Russia and the post-Soviet space. The request was met by a dismissive American non-response response.

While he was writing the story of a terror response to a serious geopolitical issue, it does raise eyebrows that a first-rate pro like Hersh does not even bother to examine the complex geopolitical background.

In a nutshell: the ultimate Mackinderian anathema for the U.S. ruling classes – and that’s bipartisan – is a Germany-Russia alliance, extended to China: that would mean the U.S. expelled from Eurasia, and that conditions everything any American government thinks and does in terms of NATO and Russia.

Hersh should also have noticed that the timing of the preparation to “sabotage the pipelines” completely blows apart the official United States government narrative, according to which this a collective West effort to help Ukraine against “unprovoked Russian aggression”.

That elusive source

The narrative leaves no doubt that Hersh’s source – if not the journalist himself – supports what is considered a lawful U.S. policy: to fight Russia’s “threat to Western dominance [in Europe].”

So what seems a U.S. Navy covert op, according to the narrative, may have been misguided not because of serious geopolitical reasons; but because the attack planning intentionally evaded U.S. law “requiring Congress to be informed”. That’s an extremely parochial interpretation of international relations. Or, to be blunt: that’s an apology of Exceptionalism.

And that brings us to what may be the Rosebud in this Orson Welles-worthy saga. Hersh refers to a “secure room on the top floor of the Old Executive Office Building …that was also the home of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board”.

This was supposedly the place where the terror attack planning was being discussed.

So welcome to PIAB: the President Intelligence Advisory Board. All members are appointed by the current POTUS, in this case Joe Biden. If we examine the list of current members of PIAB, we should, in theory, find Hersh’s source (see, for instance, “President Biden Announces Appointments to the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and the National Science Board”; “President Biden Announces Key Appointments”; “President Biden Announces Key Appointments to Boards and Commissions”; “President Biden Announces Key Appointments to Boards and Commissions”; and “President Biden Announces Key Appointments to Boards and Commissions”.

Here are the members of PIAB appointed by Biden: Sandy Winnefeld; Gilman Louie; Janet Napolitano; Richard Verma; Evan Bayh; Anne Finucane; Mark Angelson; Margaret Hamburg; Kim Cobb; and Kneeland Youngblood.

Hersh’s source, according to his narrative, asserts, without a shadow of a doubt, that “Russian troops had been steadily and ominously building up on the borders of Ukraine” and that “alarm was growing in Washington”. It’s beggars belief that this supposedly well informed lot didn’t know about the massing of NATO-led Ukrainian troops across the line of contact, getting ready to launch a blitzkrieg against Donbass.

What everyone already knew by then – as the record shows even on YouTube – is that the combo behind “Biden” were dead set on terminating the Nord Streams by whatever means necessary. After the start of the SMO, the only thing missing was to find a mechanism for plausible deniability.

For all its meticulous reporting, the inescapable feeling remains that what Hersh’s narrative indicts is the Biden combo terror gambit, and never the overall U.S. plan to provoke Russia into a proxy war with NATO using Ukraine as cannon fodder.

Moreover, Hersh’s source may be eminently flawed. He – or she – said, according to Hersh, that Russia “failed to respond” to the pipeline terror attack because “maybe they want the capability to do the same things the U.S. did”.

In itself, this may prove that the source was not even a member of PIAB, and did not receive the classified PIAB report assessing Putin’s crucial speech of September 30, which identifies the “responsible” party. If that’s the case, the source is just connected (italics mine) to some PIAB member; was not invited to the months-long situation-room planning; and certainly is not aware of the finer details of this administration’s war in Ukraine.

Considering Sy Hersh’s stellar track record in investigative journalism, it would be quite refreshing for him to elucidate these inconsistencies. That would get rid of the fog of rumors depicting the report as a mere limited hangout.

Considering there are several “silos” of intel within the U.S. oligarchy, with their corresponding apparatuses, and Hersh has cultivated his contacts among nearly all of them for decades, there’s no question the allegedly privileged information on the Nord Stream saga came from a very precise address – with a very precise agenda.

So we should see who the story really indicts: certainly the Straussian neo-con/neoliberal-con combo behind “Biden”, and the wobbly President himself. As I pointed out in my initial analysis, the CIA gets away with flying colors.

And we should not forget that the Big Narrative is changing fast: the RAND report, the looming NATO humiliation in Ukraine, Balloon Hysteria, UFO psy op. The real “threat” is – who else – China. What’s left for all of us is to swim in a swamp crammed with derelict patsies, dodgy cover stories and intel debris. Knowing that those who really run the show never show their hand. (read more)

We should not kid ourselves, this war is not, repeat, NOT about the Ukraine or even the future of the EU. This is a war which will decide whether the Anglo-Zionists will take full control of our planet or whether the last empire in history will be replaced by a multi-polar, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-cultural, multi-political international order, regulated by the rule of law.

The Saker, 14 February 2023

The following describes only one of hundreds of possible future scenarios. Some may find this one particularly unthinkable. But if anyone on 17 February 2022 had predicted where we would be today, on 17 February 2023, they too would have been laughed at. Unthinkable? Nobody thought that the 500-year old Western abscess would burst on 24 February 2022, spreading its stink and poison all over the world. But it did. Nothing is now unthinkable in our new, multipolar world. This is both exciting and frightening, but it is also inevitable.

The Washington Post, Special Evening Edition, Wednesday 15 May 2024

TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD

In New Ukraine

Our readers will remember the astounding Easter Peace Parade in Kiev on Sunday 5 May 2024, when tens of thousands of triumphant New Ukrainian, Russian and Belarussian troops marched together in solidarity through the centre of Kiev to celebrate peace after over two years of armed struggle and the final Slav victory over Nazism. The hundreds of thousands who had gathered to watch and listen to the speeches afterwards all felt that the common sense of unity and victory over Nazism was palpable.

After the Peace Parade, President Medvedchuk of New Ukraine (the seventeen Central and Western provinces of the old Soviet Ukraine) proclaimed in his speech on the Maidan Square that New Ukraine would be rebuilt as a federal civil society. With the old oligarchs expelled to Miami and Tel Aviv and their assets confiscated, he saw a new dawn for the new country. With its security guaranteed by the Allied Forces of Russia, New Ukraine and Belarus, his country had been able to reduce military spending greatly.

On the subject of debt to Western countries, especially to the USA, President Medvedchuk made it clear that this had nothing to do with New Ukraine and he suggested that lenders should contact ex-Presidents Poroshenko and Zelensky and other oligarchs in Tel Aviv. New Ukraine had borrowed nothing, it was debt-free. Cheap Russian energy would ensure that its people would at last be dragged out of the poverty and corruption into which they had fallen over thirty years before. He pointed with optimism to the ongoing restoration of infrastructure which Russia was carrying out in co-operation with Belarussian and Ukrainian technicians, aided by Chinese and Iranian engineers.

Standing behind President Medvedchuk were his guests, President Lukashenko and President Putin. The latter said in the speech that followed that the Russian Federation had finally been able to dismantle the last vestiges of the USSR, the Soviet Ukraine, the product of the three dictators, Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchov, restoring it to freedom. The nine Russian provinces of the east and south of the old Ukraine (Crimea, Lugansk, Donetsk, Kharkov, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporozhia, Kherson, Nikolaev, Odessa) had now all returned to the Russian Federation, exactly as the voters in internationally observed referenda in those provinces had desired. He was confident that the upcoming referenda in the provinces of Transcarpathia (renamed Carpatho-Rus) and Chernovtsy on possibly returning to Hungary and Romania respectively would express an overwhelming desire to remain in New Ukraine. This was with the exception of some border villages, which would be democratically ceded to those countries.

President Putin was confident that New Ukraine had a bright future as one of the three Allied States of Rus’. He added that massive Russian and Chinese investment, as enthusiastically already provided by President Xi, was going to make it into one of the leading states of Eurasia, as it had such rich agricultural and industrial resources. He also noted that 1,200,000 refugees who had fled the Nazi genocide in the old eastern Ukraine for Russia between 2014 and 2022 had already returned there to rebuild. President Medvedchuk added that 1,800,000 Ukrainians had already returned to the Federation of New Ukraine from Western countries, fleeing poverty there and keen to rebuild their new country, where there was work and investment in abundance. However, he said that all returnees were being carefully vetted. Any sign of Nazi sympathies would mean their permanent exclusion from New Ukraine. Already over 60,000 had been rejected. At this point President Lukashenko added: Nazis? Never again!’ The crowd that numbered over one million applauded these words enthusiastically, chanting them again and gain.

In the evening, after the Peace Parade, the eve of St George’s Day for Ukrainians, certain unruly elements in the crowd threw Molotov cocktails through the windows of the hastily evacuated US Embassy in Kiev. They vigorously called for Presidents Biden, von der Leyen and Zelensky, of whom the last had fled to Miami last February and is now in hiding there, to be tried for war crimes. This would be together with the other Nazis now on trial at the International War Crimes Tribunal in Mariupol.

Despite the best efforts of the Kiev fire services, the old Embassy could not be saved and was burned to the ground. Observers have said that it should never be rebuilt and be replaced with a huge memorial to all the victims of the US-run Nazi genocide of 2014-2024 of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers and civilians. This suggestion was greeted with enthusiasm, as it was from its roof that American and Lithuanian snipers had killed so many Ukrainians in February 2014, which had started the whole catastrophe which ended the old Ukraine.

In the EU

The notes of optimism in New Ukraine on 5 May contrasted with the sombre mood and outright chaos in the rest of Europe, as coup after coup in country after country toppled the old elites, most of whom have fled to the US. Readers will recall how after the victory and breakthrough at Bakhmut in March 2023, Russian forces had sped onwards to the eastern banks of the River Dniepr, while in the south amphibious landings around Odessa had led to the almost peaceful surrender of Russian-speaking Odessa in just two weeks.

The shock in the West produced by these events was partly caused by the failure of the West to understand that when Russia temporarily cedes territory, it does not mean that it is losing. In 1812 it ceded Moscow and in 1941 it nearly did the same. It was called a scorched earth policy. Yet in 1814 Russian troops occupied Paris and in 1945 Berlin. Today, having temporarily ceded some small areas in the old eastern Ukraine in 2022, Russia is a guest in the Kiev of New Ukraine, where it has restored democracy after comprehensively demilitarising and denazifying the old Ukraine in just twenty-six months.

We remind readers that according to the CIA Factbook the five countries with the largest GNP in the world in 2023 were, in order, China, US, India, Japan and Russia. Since Russia overtook Germany in 2023, this meant that there is no longer a single Western European country in the top five. Indeed, both Indonesia and Brazil have larger economies than France and the UK, which are Nos 9 and 10 in the list.

It was the chain of events that followed the Russian victory in Bakhmut last March that eventually led to the request from Berlin to Moscow in January 2024 to repair the Nordstream pipelines which had been blown up by the US, as it had admitted. When the US officially forbade any repairs on 6 May this year, dramatic scenes took place as Bundeswehr troops with Leopard tanks immediately surrounded the main US base in Germany at Ramstein and threatened to attack if US forces were not evacuated by the end of the month firing at key buildings and destroying three warplanes.

This had followed the mass violent street demonstrations against all things American in various German cities, especially in the east, which had forced Chancellor Scholz into hiding in a bunker somewhere in Berlin. The US duly began flying out of Ramstein the next day. Russian and German technicians reckon that repairs to Nordstream should be finished by late July. German businessmen are eager for Russian gas supplies to be restored. The repair bill will be sent to Washington and Oslo. If they do not pay, all their assets in Germany will be frozen. Rumour has it that the new German government is going to impose sanctions against the US.

On 7 May mass demonstrations in Paris turned ugly, with the French CRS paramilitary police refusing to open fire on hungry crowds. After three days of siege ex-President Macron and his wife, who is said to have told the crowds ‘to eat cake’ if they had no bread, were forced to flee. They left in a private helicopter paid for by the Rothschild Bank from their residence at the Elysee Palace. From there they were taken by an anti-government French military plane from the Vélizy-Villacoublay airbase outside Paris to Tel Aviv. The new French government led by Marine Le Pen declared that France was leaving NATO and the EU. When elderly bureaucrats in Brussels stated that France would not be allowed to leave, the Le Pen government froze all EU assets in French banks and surrounded the EU Parliament in Strasbourg with tanks because it represented ‘an unelected government’.

In Italy the 87-year old President Berlusconi, who attributes his immense energy to daily doses of viagra, has declared that all US bases in Italy must be evacuated by the end of June, or else…These comments were made at Leonardo da Vinci–Fiumicino Airport on 10 May, just before flying off to Moscow with a group of Italian businessmen (and one very attractive businesswoman) and signing a Russo-Italian Friendship Pact.

On 11 May the new People’s Party government in Romania made mass arrests of old politicians on corruption charges. In parallel with the new Socialist government in Moldova, it stated that it wished to join the Eurasian Union (Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Hungary, Austria, Slovenia and Croatia had already joined on 8 May) and were leaving the EU and expelling all US nationals. It is expected that Romania and Moldova will declare political and economic union on a federal basis. Bulgaria followed suit 48 hours later, demanding that all US nationals leave by the end of the month.

On 14 May the Baltic States and Poland hurriedly passed new laws granting human rights to their Russian minorities and all four countries have stated that they are leaving NATO and demilitarising with immediate effect.

In the UK

The radical Socialist Momentum Party government which came to power on 2 May after its landslide win at the UK Parliamentary Election has launched a wave of ‘deprivatisations’, and allowed the toppling of the statue of Mrs Thatcher in London with the help of a tank. It has also confiscated all assets of British oligarchs, leaving no-one with more than £25 million. Readers will recall that the Election had been called as a result of the exposure of massive corruption scandals among ministers of the former government which collapsed on 14 March after a ten-day General Strike, in which the Police also took part. Readers will remember how furious strikers sacked the BBC building in London on 13 March after their cause had been ‘misrepresented’ by BBC journalists, chanting, ‘Down with BBC liars’.

Yesterday, on 14 May, English Independence was declared by the Momentum government, after Scotland and Wales had made Unilateral Declarations of Independence and Northern Ireland reunited with the Republic of Ireland, but as a self-governing province.

From his English-style villa in the hill station at Shimla, ex-Prime Minister Sunak, dressed in Indian clothing, spoke warmly of the future of banking in India. As regards the former UK, he said that there was nothing more he could do and that the situation was out of control. No comments have been received from ex-Prime Minister Truss so far. She now lives in Dallas where, thanks to her unique intellectual abilities, she works in a tiny office at a schoolbook depository and is writing a geography textbook for pre-schoolers. As for ex-Prime Minister Johnson, he is still gravely ill in hospital in Kingston, Jamaica, with alcohol poisoning. This follows the ‘Churchill challenge’ at his villa, where he tried to imitate his idol, Winston Churchill, by drinking three bottles of whisky a day for ten days running.

In the USA

However, it is today’s events in Washington which have really shaken the old Western world. Huge and angry American nationalist crowds at the Capitol, numbering at least two million and led by ex-President Trump are threatening to take over the administration unless elections are called immediately. The National Guard is powerless against such immense numbers and apparently guardsmen have refused to use tear gas against the crowds. Some guardsmen have even been seen switching sides and joining the protestors.

The crowds are carrying placards with slogans like: ‘Food and Justice’, ‘Arrest the Oligarchs’, ‘Give us Free Medicine’, ‘America First’, ‘Isolation for the Nation’, ‘Down with CNN’ and chanting their favourite ‘Drain the Swamp’ slogan. At 2.45 this afternoon ex-President Trump stood up and announced: ‘Yuh stole the election. OK, Swamp, you had yuh chance to cut a deal. And you didn’t wanna. Well, now we’re gonna come and drain yuh! Good job!’ He was greeted with millions of shouts of approval and chants like, ‘Go for it’ and ‘USA, USA, USA’, as crowds surged forward towards the Capitol. We await imminent developments.

Meanwhile, President Biden, who is still in his bunker at Camp David knows nothing of all this, as he sank into a coma brought on when he viewed the victorious Kiev Peace Parade on 5 May. Ironically, he who was nicknamed ‘Sleepy Joe’ was yesterday administered a large dose of morphine and is said to have had a ‘comfortable night’. Vice-President Harris has not been seen for 72 hours and rumours are rife as to her whereabouts. No-one seems to be in charge.

BREAKING NEWS

We have just heard from London, England, that King Charles III has abdicated, under pressure from the Socialist Momentum Party. It has called for a ‘People’s Monarch’ who is of English and not German blood. Crowds that gathered in Trafalgar Square at 3.00 Washington time (8.00 pm London time) have been heard calling for a ‘People’s Monarchy’ and chanting the names of various celebrities, ‘X for King’, ‘Y for Queen’ etc. Further developments are expected shortly.

BREAKING NEWS

We have received reports from Reuters that large numbers of Chinese troops and parachutists have landed on Taiwan where they have been greeted as liberators. These reports have yet to be confirmed.

17 February 2023