Boris thinks Ukraine is just a fun game - he is one sick MF

 

 

Boris toys with the destruction of life on the planet. He belongs in an insane asylum for certain.

Take the toys away from the boys....and girls.

Bruce 

PS Boris might as well say 'Heil Hitler!' at the end of the video.

Global Banks Privately Prepare for ‘Dangerous Levels’ of Imminent Civil Unrest

By Nafeez Ahmed

Global banks and investment firms are bracing themselves for an “unprecedented” upsurge in civil unrest in the US, UK and Europe as energy and food price spikes are set to drive costs of living to astronomical levels, Byline Times can exclusively reveal. 

The information comes from the head of a ‘financial institutions group’ – which provides expertise and advisory services to other banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions – at one of the largest investment firms in the US.

The senior investment executive, who spoke to Byline Times on condition of anonymity because the information he revealed is considered highly sensitive, said that contingency planners at top financial institutions believe “dangerous levels” of social breakdown in the West are now all but inevitable, and imminent. An outbreak of civil unrest is expected to occur anytime this year, but most likely in the coming months as the impact of the cost of living crisis begins to saturate the lives of “everyone”.

"Well-to-do middle classes will find it hard to afford staple foods and pay bills. So we are anticipating dangerous levels of civil unrest that could spiral into an unprecedented social crisis".

The executive works at a leading Wall Street firm which is considered a systemically important financial institution by the US Financial Stability Board. These are institutions whose functioning is considered critical to the US economy, and whose failure could trigger a financial crisis.

According to the executive, major banks all over the world including in the US, UK and Western Europe are instructing their top managers to begin actively planning how they will respond to the impact of financial disruption triggered by a prolonged episode of civil unrest. However, the banking official did not elaborate on what these planning measures involved beyond reference to stress testing to determine the impact on investment portfolios.

While increased civil unrest in developing countries has been openly discussed by major institutions such as the UN, World Bank, IMF and other institutions, this is the first time in recent years that expectations of a coming epidemic of social breakdown in Western societies has been attributed to top banking and investment firms.
 

“All the major banks know that the cost of living crisis is out of control,” said the top financial advisor.

“The pandemic was bad enough and highlighted how certain groups of people were going to be worse affected, the poor, minorities and so on. But the combination of energy and food shocks are a tipping point that will push Western societies over the edge. This will impact everyone. Well-to-do middle classes will find it hard to afford staple foods and pay bills. So we are anticipating dangerous levels of civil unrest that could spiral into an unprecedented social crisis.” 

The warning comes as Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey described how “apocalyptic” food and energy price rises and a 30-year high rate of inflation would lead to a “very big income shock” driving up unemployment and slashing household spending. 

But that barely scratches the surface. The senior US banking official warned Byline Times that the current crisis was about to plunge the general public, including middle classes, into deepening poverty. Worse, the conventional economic toolbox to address financial volatility had run out of stream:
 

“There isn’t anything left in the toolbox of the existing financial system. We’ve run out of options. I can only see the situation worsening.”

The official claimed that they had been made aware of the internal planning by various banks through conversations with senior colleagues in recent weeks.

The official’s warnings fit into an analysis I’d put together in 2017 where I had argued that a combination of energy, food and debt crises similar to what we had seen in the run up to the 2008 financial crash were likely to reappear in the coming years in a more intense form. The global system, I’d warned, was in the midst of a protracted collapse process as the incumbent fossil fuel-dominant paradigm crumbles into a spiral of diminishing returns. Although I’d expected this global crisis convergence to happen earlier, it was delayed by the impact of the pandemic, which temporarily reduced demand and global consumption.

A major outbreak of civil unrest this year would be consistent with a rising trend in political violence over the last decade since the 2008 financial crash, as documented by the Institute for Economics and Peace’s Global Peace Index. Between 2011 and 2019, demonstrations, strikes and riots around the world increased by 244% and continued to increase in 2020 during the pandemic.

The Global Peace Index’s latest figures show that global peace has deteriorated for the ninth time in a row by 0.07%, and has overall worsened over the last 15 years. Violent demonstrations and riots have now occurred in 158 countries, over 80% of the world. This escalating trend in civil unrest fits into a pattern of ‘systemic’ social unrest, with multiple countries simultaneously expressing dissatisfaction, anger, and demanding change.

The rising trend did not begin 15 years ago. It, too, is part of a much longer rising trend in political violence which began to especially accelerate since the 1970s, which is when the global economy first entered a stage of ecological ‘overshoot’.

The evidence of escalating instability in the global system suggests it is entering a period of rapid, dramatic change as incumbent industries and political institutions are losing control. While the prospect of intensifying instability is daunting, the weakening of the status quo is opening up a new possibility space to explore previously unthinkable alternatives.

The managers of the incumbent paradigm cannot see this opportunity. In particular, they cannot recognise that the feedback loop of accelerating energy, economic and food crises is intensifying because the dominant carbon-intensive industries in these sectors are economically obsolete, with huge geopolitical consequences as they unravel before our eyes.

Contrary to the grim fatalism of established financial institutions – which see no way out of a crisis very much of their own making – new visions and ideas for economic transformation coupled with the continued acceleration of key technology disruptions in energy, transportation and food suggest that the very collapse of the incumbent paradigm is paving the way for a breakthrough into a new system. But citizens, including those working in the financial sector, must be able to see this opportunity before they can seize it. 

A covid tragedy: smell and taste gone

 

 

Diana Selic, a 45-year-old baker, is now struggling to restore her normal sense of taste and smell. 

Originally from Serbia, she has been living in #France for 23 years and now owns a bakery in Lyon. In the summer of 2021, Selic contracted COVID-19 in Budva, Montenegro, leaving her with the aftermath of the loss of smell and an altered sense of taste. She still hasn't fully recovered. 

These symptoms have impeded her work as a baker and her ability to enjoy the foods she loves. #longcovid "It's unbearable for me to not be able to smell," Selic said. She has been cooking all her life, but now she doesn't know how to do anything right. "There's not much that I can do except try to re-educate my brain, which is not an easy task."

In this video, she tells CGTN global stringer about her struggles to accommodate this disturbing inability.

Western Tensions With Russia And China Extend To Outer Space

 

  ESA has ended its cooperation with Russia on Mars over the Russian special operation in Ukraine.

 

By Uriel Araujo (Researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts)

In June, authorities from both the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency (ESA) met in an unprecedented virtual summit to discuss joint missions. Chinese and Russian authorities were not present. ESA’s Director General, Josef Aschbacher claimed that since the outbreak of the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict this year, “the world order has changed”.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson had suggested American rockets be employed to speed the now suspended European ExoMars. It aimed to investigate the geo-chemical aspects of the Martian  landscapes in the search for forms of life or traces of it and to identify hazards for a future human mission to the planet. It also aimed to exploit solar electric power on the Martian surface and to access its subsurface, amongst other goals.

ESA and the formerly called Russian Federal Space Agency (now Roscosmos) signed a contract in August 2009, which included their cooperation on two Mars endeavors, Russia’s own Fobos-Grunt project and ESA’s ExoMars. Then, in December 2009, ESA also approved NASA’s participation in a Martian exploration mission. However, in 2012 NASA terminated its participation for budgetary reasons. In 2013, ESA and Roscosmos signed a deal thereby making Russia a full partner, with all scientific results becoming intellectual property of both the ESA itself and the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In 2016 the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) was sent to map methane’s sources on Mars. A second launch had been planned, but since 2016, however, ExoMars has suffered a series of delays due to financial problems. The Roscosmos lander called Kazachok was supposed to deliver the ESA Rosalind Franklin rover to Mars, but the European agency suspended this mission over the issue of Ukraine in March. It now expects to resume these operations, in a new mission (yet to be named), without employing Russian landing platforms. This change however will postpone such plans, which are now expected to take place after 2028. ESA has frozen almost all liaisons with the Russian Federation.

The European Agency, though, has maintained its partnership with China since at least 2003, and Chinese and European cosmonauts had been training together. In 2017, ESA director Rudiger Seine stated that the agency’s goal was “flying European astronauts on the Chinese space station from 2022”. The problem is that today many voices are demanding that this collaboration be suspended too, over Beijing’s supposed “no limits” partnership with Moscow. It had been already interrupted anyway due to the pandemic and at this point it might never resume.

As of today, the European Parliament has imposed sanctions on Chinese authorities over human rights issues pertaining to the Muslim minority in China and Beijing, in turn, has responded sanctioning Europe’s own Subcommittee on Human Rights. The “red line” for the West seems to have been the perceived Chinese support for Moscow in the Ukrainian crisis.

ESA needs partners, and amid such tensions, it would only be natural for the agency and NASA to further strengthen their ties, under a common “universalist” Western narrative that focuses on “human rights”, “democracy”, and so on, in spite of the contradictions and the hypocrisy that such discourse veils, while the West covers up Ukrainian own human rights abuses and its blatant far-right extremism and neo-Nazism.

Interestingly, NASA and Roscosmos announced on Friday that integrated Russian-American flights to the International Space Station (ISS) will remain. This announcement was made shortly after the Russian agency Director General Dmitry Rogozin was replaced with Yuri Borisov. Rogozin had been in the middle of tensions with the US, over his denouncing of Elon Musk, the head of the American SpaceX, whom he accused of providing military communication for “fascist forces” in Ukraine. Rogozin’s replacement has been interpreted by some as a kind of Russian concession, in the spirit of dialogue and scientific cooperation.

Two weeks ago, Nelson had stated that “you need both Russians and Americans to operate the space station”. Even in March, at the beginning of the current war, he said, referring to the civilian space programme: “Despite all of that, up in space, we can have a cooperation with our Russian friends, our colleagues.”

This new development is quite surprising considering the fact that the US-led West has been seeking to “cancel” Russia in all realms of life (even arts and science) amid an intense russophobic campaign. It might be yet another sign that Washington still considers adopting a more conciliatory tone, as plan B or at least toys with the idea, trying to keep some channels open, in spite of the aggressive rhetoric and the lack of good diplomacy.

In any case, one should expect things to get tense in space too, even in “civilian” areas, as NATO’s new space doctrine recognizes outer space as a “new operational domain”, where it seeks to oppose Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. Moreover, there is now a space race over placing a base on the moon, with increasing Russian-Chinese collaboration. Emerging powers such as Turkey aspire to dominate space technology, and the new American Space Force uses its Gulf base to monitor Iran.

All civilian aspects of outer space exploration involve in fact highly strategic knowledge and applications. This realm could be understood as the “new sea”, with new continents to explore. Thus, the geopolitical and geo-economic competition among powers that today encompasses earth and ocean should extend itself to the realm of space too, even extending to the celestial bodies. 

"2023 Will Be A Year From Hell"

 

  

 Martin Armstrong Warns of 

Inflation-Driven Civil-Unrest

by Tyler Durden (ZeroHedge)


Legendary financial and geopolitical cycle analyst Martin Armstrong says the time to prepare is now for what is coming in 2023.

Armstrong’s Socrates computer program is predicting “2023 will be the year from Hell.”

Armstrong explains, “Our computer is predicting a ‘war cycle’ that hits in 2023, but that is also civil unrest..."

    "...so, you are looking at revolutions and etc. because of inflation.  Our projection on oil is that it is going to go up dramatically into 2023.  It’s going to be the same thing, I think, for gasoline prices.  This is just not over yet.  The euro looks like death warmed over...

    Our computer is projecting the continued decline of the euro and rising commodity prices.  With these sanctions on Russia, you just had the leader of Hungary say Europe is committing suicide.  The sanctions are hurting Europe more than they are hurting Russia.  This is like a shot to the lung.  They can’t even breath at this stage.”

Armstrong says you are not going to have to wait until next year to see extreme stress in the financial system.  Armstrong is seeing financial upheavals coming in the August and September time frame.  So, the economic pain is already here and getting worse, especially in Europe.  Armstrong says,

    “I think you are going to see this come to a head. . . . It’s definitely tanking more anyway. . . . What makes things even worse for the world is the dollar going up and not down.  This is because you had all these emerging markets issue debt in dollars...

    They were borrowing in dollars because it was a cheaper interest rate, and they had no concept of the foreign exchange risk...This happened in Australia.  The currency swings, and, now, suddenly you owe 20% more....

    You had the same thing with all these emerging markets. . . . Now, the dollar is going up and you are seeing bank runs.”

Armstrong says not only is the euro dramatically declining, but the euro bonds are being shunned by U.S. banks.  This is another bad financial sign for the EU.

Armstrong says,

    “All these things are a real crisis.  I can tell you that speaking to the top three banks in New York City, they refuse to accept any European sovereign debt as collateral—period.  That is what started the whole repo crisis in 2019.”

So, we are entering into a debt crisis with the EU financial system in the crosshairs.  Armstrong says,

    “This is why they are pushing for war.... They think they can create a new monetary system, and to do so, they need war.  

    They think they can keep it just conventional.  Then the United Nations can emerge as the white knight and the peacemaker.

    Therefore, we get another Bretton Woods.  You can redesign all the currencies, and when you do that, you wipe out all the debt.  That is what is on the agenda....

    There is no way they can get out of this other than default.  If they default, they are worried about millions of people storming the parliaments of Europe...

    This is really a tremendous financial crisis that we are facing.  They have been borrowing year after year since WWII with zero intention of paying anything back.”

Why is the US-NATO rushing into war with Russia and China?

 

 

The latest Space Alert podcast interview is with John Walsh who lives in the Bay area in California.
 
Until recently John was Professor of Physiology and Neuroscience at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School.

He has written on issues of peace and health care for the San Francisco Chronicle, EastBayTimes/San Jose Mercury News, Asia Times, LA Progressive, Antiwar.com, CounterPunch, Consortium News, Scheerpost and others.

John is also an active member of Veterans For Peace Russia Working Group.

He is interviewed by Global Network coordinator Bruce Gagnon who lives in Brunswick, Maine.

Kiev's Nazi forces attack Donbass since 2014

Since 2014 the US-UK-NATO armed, trained and directed military forces of Ukraine have been sent to the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine (along the Russian border) to kill their fellow citizens whose only crime is they speak Russian.
 
Since the US orchestrated coup d'etat in Kiev in 2014 more than 14,000 people have been killed in the Donbass and more than 34,000 wounded.
 
The New York Times reported on June 25 that the CIA (with allied intelligence agency support) has been directing the war in Ukraine.

So far the US Congress has appropriated  $54 billion for the US proxy war in Ukraine against Russia.

$54 billion and counting

When it came to a vote in the US House and Senate - all Democrats in Congress voted in favor of sending these funds to Kiev. Only Republicans (primarily in the House) voted NO.

The funding bills passed overwhelmingly at the very time our own economy in the US is suffering dramatically. The same can be said about NATO member nations who also have sent major funding to Kiev for the war.

The Rand Corporation study of 2019 calls for the 'Overextending and Unbalancing Russia'.

Watching the dollar slide downhill....

 

 

Washington's desperation and arrogance is increasingly slamming the dollar into irrelevance.  

Nations (particularly in the Global South) are realizing they can't trust the Empire of Lies anymore. 

Why should they put their faith in the dollar when at any moment, if they dared disagree with Washington on an issue, their monetary assets could be frozen and stolen from them like the US-EU has done to Afghanistan and Russia?

This was a huge wake-up call for much of the world.

The momentum is building across the planet - nations are moving away from western economic and political institutions. Instead they are getting in line to join multi-polar institutions. This trend will only grow in the coming months and years.

We are witnessing the collapse of the American empire - right before our eyes.

Call if Karma, justice, blow-back, or whatever - but call it real. Call it now.

Bruce 

By making China the enemy, NATO is threatening world peace

 

 

By Jonathan Cook

 

  NATO’s new posture towards Beijing brings into question its whole claim to be a ‘defensive’ alliance

As the saying goes, if you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The West has the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato), a self-declared “defensive” military alliance – so any country that refuses its dictates must, by definition, be an offensive military threat. 

That is part of the reason why Nato issued a new “strategic concept” document last week at its summit in Madrid, declaring for the first time that China poses a “systemic challenge” to the alliance, alongside a primary “threat” from Russia.

Beijing views this new designation as a decisive step by Nato on the path to pronouncing it a “threat” too – echoing the alliance’s escalatory approach towards Moscow over the past decade. In its previous mission statement, issued in 2010, Nato advocated “a true strategic partnership” with Russia.

According to a report in the New York Times, China would have found itself openly classed as a “threat” last week had it not been for Germany and France. They insisted that the more hostile terminology be watered down so as to avoid harming their trade and technology links with China.

In response, Beijing accused Nato of “maliciously attacking and smearing” it, and warned that the alliance was “provoking confrontation”. Not unreasonably, Beijing believes Nato has strayed well out of its sphere of supposed “defensive” interest: the North Atlantic.

Nato was founded in the wake of the Second World War expressly as a bulwark against Soviet expansion into Western Europe. The ensuing Cold War was primarily a territorial and ideological battle for the future of Europe, with the ever-present mutual threat of nuclear annihilation.

So how, Beijing might justifiably wonder, does China – on the other side of the globe – fit into Nato’s historic “defensive” mission? How are Chinese troops or missiles now threatening Europe or the US in ways they weren’t before? How are Americans or Europeans suddenly under threat of military conquest from China? 

Creating enemies 

The current Nato logic reads something like this: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February is proof that the Kremlin has ambitions to recreate its former Soviet empire in Europe. China is growing its military power and has similar imperial designs towards the rival, breakaway state of Taiwan, as well as western Pacific islands. And because Beijing and Moscow are strengthening their strategic ties in the face of western opposition, Nato has to presume that their shared goal is to bring western civilisation crashing down.

 

Or as last week’s Nato mission statement proclaimed: “The deepening strategic partnership between the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation and their mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order run counter to our values and interests.”

But if anyone is subverting the “rules-based international order”, a standard the West regularly invokes but never defines, it looks to be Nato itself – or the US, as the hand that wields the Nato hammer.

That is certainly the way it looks to Beijing. In its response, China argued: “Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, [Nato] has not yet abandoned its thinking and practice of creating ‘enemies’ … It is Nato that is creating problems around the world.”

China has a point. A problem with bureaucracies – and Nato is the world’s largest military bureaucracy – is that they quickly develop an overriding institutional commitment to ensuring their permanent existence, if not expansion. Bureaucracies naturally become powerful lobbies for their own self-preservation, even when they have outlived their usefulness.

If there is no threat to “defend” against, then a threat must be manufactured. That can mean one of two things: either inventing an imaginary threat, or provoking the very threat the bureaucracy was designed to avert or thwart. Signs are that Nato – now embracing 30 countries – is doing both.

Remember that Nato should have dissolved itself after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. But three decades later, it is bigger and more resource-hungry than ever.

Against all advice, and in violation of its promises, Nato has refused to maintain a neutral “security buffer” between itself and Russia. Instead, it has been expanding right up to Russia’s borders, including creeping furtively into Ukraine, the gateway through which armies have historically invaded Russia.

Offensive alliance

Undoubtedly, Russia has proved itself a genuine threat to the territorial integrity of its neighbour Ukraine by conquering its eastern region – home to a large ethnic Russian community the Kremlin claims to be protecting. But even if we reject Russian President Vladimir Putin’s repeated assertion that Moscow has no larger ambitions, the Russian army’s substantial losses suggest it has scant hope of extending its military reach much further.

Even if Moscow were hoping to turn its attention next to Poland or the Baltic states, or Nato’s latest recruits of Sweden and Finland, such a move would clearly risk nuclear confrontation. This is perhaps why western audiences hear so much from their politicians and media about Putin being some kind of deranged megalomaniac.

The claim of a rampant, revived Russian imperialism appears not to be founded in any obvious reality. But it is a very effective way for Nato bureaucrats to justify enlarging their budgets and power, while the arms industries that feed off Nato and are embedded in western capitals substantially increase their profits.

The impression that this might have been Nato’s blueprint for handling Moscow is only underscored by the way it is now treating China, with even less justification. China has not recently invaded any sovereign territories, unlike the US and its allies, while the only territory it might threaten – Taiwan – is some 12,000 kilometres from the US mainland, and a similarly long distance from most of Europe.

The argument that the Russian army may defeat Ukraine and then turn its attention towards Poland and Finland at least accords with some kind of geographical possibility, however remote. But the idea that China may invade Taiwan and then direct its military might towards California and Italy is in the realms of preposterous delusion.

Nato’s new posture towards Beijing brings into question its whole characterisation as a “defensive” alliance. It looks very much to be on the offensive.

Read the rest of this important article here

 ~  Jonathan Cook, based in Nazareth, Israel is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). Read other articles by Jonathan, or visit Jonathan's website. 

Koohan Paik-Mander discusses military ecocide in the Pacific

 

 

GN Board member Koohan Paik-Mander speaks about the giant RIMPAC war exercises now taking place in Hawaii -- on land, in air, on coastlines and on the open seas. 

The militaries of 26 nations have come together and are enacting the next World War.

China builds rail & schools while U.S. drops bombs

 

 

By Kiji Noh

Good big picture analysis by Andy Boreham [in the video above].

But the "debt trap diplomacy" trope here is not just information warfare to attack and delegitimate China. It is to ensure that any subsequent government Sri Lanka (SL) breaks or reduces ties with China.

SL is very likely a US-instigated or encouraged color revolution, using US--not Chinese--debt-trap weapons to force chaos, regime change, austerity, and to ensure US military basing.

Sri Lanks is not particularly indebted.  There is a short term dollar liquidity issue, a few billion that was due in the short term. This issue is tied to disruptions from US-led sanctions on Russia--trade, remittances, tourism.

These short term cash positions could have been managed by rolling over the debt, if the West, which holds most of the debt had decided to. Instead, it has tightened the screws, put SL into a choke hold, thus leading to a dollar liquidity crisis--a financial cardiac arrest. This has led to extreme shortages of fuel and fertilizer, and this in term has stoked protests and discontent.

The US, through proxies, has leveraged this into a full blown crisis--"make them scream"--and now a coup, a coup that asks for IMF intervention--just as the Hong Kong rioters asked for Trump's intervention.  

You know you're in color revolution territory when the protestors make demands for foreign intervention.

This is the IMF's definitionally insane 17th round of intervention in SL, so it's not like they were asking for something they hoped could work.

The IMF will strip assets, privatize SL health care and public infrastructure putting SL into an IMF headlock and kneel it back down into a subordinate (as opposed to non-aligned) role as part of US Indo-Pacific strategy against China.

The coup was related to the fact that SL is getting close to China and Russia.  It was developing with the help of China.  It had avoided an earlier crisis on sovereign debt with Chinese help (it leased--not gave--the port of Hambantota to China). 

Most recently, SL had negotiated a resolution to its fuel crisis with Russia.  It was to receive Russian fuel. Like the EuroMaidan, immediately afterwards, after this negotiation, the Coup happened.  (Victoria Nuland had visited a few months earlier).

The structures of modern governance in most countries are not yet strong enough to resist a coup if the US sets its mind on it, just as few of the countries of the global south (Korea, Indonesia, Africa, Latin America) or Europe were able to resist US interference during the cold war.  

SL is a key node of the Belt & Road  Initiative --in particular the Hambantota port and the economic zones that China built.  It is geopolitically important for the US's Indo-Pacific strategy.  It is a [strategic] point in the Indian Ocean (and the US base in Chagos Islands is threatened by ICJ judgements).

The US signed a secret SOFA agreement to build a base on SL with the FM--secret, as in not even notifying the ministry of defense. When this leaked, the base agreement became imperiled. This change of government will ensure the base goes through.

This is a message to the world: cooperate with China to develop independently and get out from under our yoke, and you will be in a world of chaos & pain. 

Sunday song