@QMS

Chuckle….

Full out giggling… gives new meaning to the slogan

Good grief! I woke up to a foot of snow and there is still more on the way later this week. We have more snow than we did 40 years ago when there was so much flooding that water was diverted down 2 main streets of SLC. This spring should be interesting.

I think you nailed it by pointing out the difference between China's approach to global
development and the western empire approach to global military dominance.

BRICS encourages investment in long term goals which help countries improve
while the MIC demands compliance with geopolitical strategies only benefiting a
small group of psychopaths.

The many counties now applying for membership in BRICS is growing faster than
the number of wars and influence the US is losing

Algeria, Argentina, Iran, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, Egypt, Afghanistan,
Kazakhstan, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Senegal, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates
are all interested in joining.

If accepted, the new proposed BRICS members would create an entity with a GDP 30% larger than the United States, over 50% of the global population and in control of 60% of global gas reserves.

The writing is on the wall.

https://www.silkroadbriefing.com/news/2022/11/09/the-new-candidate-count...

Thanks for hosting this and enjoy your spring Sunday.

@ggersh

.
The betrayal from Obama was gut wrenching and only the sniveling shitlibs still say that he was the best president since FDR. But now they are giving that accolade to Joe Effing Biden who is responsible for reversing most of FDR's policies.

Obama went with Tim Geitner's plan to bail out the banks and let them steal people’s homes through outright fraud and robo signed documents that wouldn’t have held up in court if Obama had decided to choose we the people instead of standing between our pitchforks and the banks.
And oh yeah Biden is going to put Geitner's sidekick back in office where she will continue to do what Tim started.
Besides destroying the OWS movement meant to hold banks accountable he also destroyed the anti war movement when he expanded PNAC's goals in the Middle East.

But it’s Biden who has made the biggest plunder of their goals by surrendering Bahgram air base that was supposed to be used when we invaded China. The last essay I posted goes into great detail of their plan started long before 9/11. It’s too bad it didn’t get the views it deserves. One of the best essays showing the plan I’ve read.

to solve all the problems. Hope and change was what we were
promised while all we got was GHWB the 4th. elections could
very well be the most meaningless act that goes on in amerika.

Democracy died long ago and it was empty suit himself imho who put the final
nail in it

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2021/08/barack-obamas-fall-from-grace/

The brutal truth is that the Obamas have been in tacky, let-them-eat-cake mode for a long time now.

President Obama was first sworn in to office on January 20, 2009 in the midst of the worst financial and economic collapse since the Great Depression — delivered to the country by the insatiable greed and corruption of the titans on Wall Street. The same men who had funded his political campaign for the Presidency.

Obama had one key job to do as President: Reform Wall Street. He punted. Instead of breaking up the mega Wall Street banks by restoring the Glass-Steagall Act, Obama signed into law the toothless Dodd-Frank financial “reform” legislation that has allowed all of the worst abuses of Wall Street to continue. At the time the legislation was signed into law in 2010, Democrats controlled the House, the Senate and the Oval Office.

On May 5, 2008, during the primary season, we wrote this:

“Seven of the Obama campaign’s top 14 donors consisted of officers and employees of the same Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages. These latest frauds have left thousands of children in some of our largest minority communities coming home from school to see eviction notices and foreclosure signs nailed to their front doors. Those scars will last a lifetime.

“These seven Wall Street firms are (in order of money given): Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse. There is also a large hedge fund, Citadel Investment Group, which is a major source of fee income to Wall Street.”

The recent birthday bash is certainly not the first time that the Obamas have been tone-deaf to the woes of the country. On February 18, 2013 we reported this:

“The President of the United States, who told us this past Tuesday evening in his State of the Union address how concerned he is with the middle class, disappeared into a millionaire’s enclave for a three-day bachelor vacation with pals. According to the White House, Tiger Woods was among those playing golf with the President. First Lady Michelle, and daughters, Malia and Sasha, are skiing out west.

“While the President is certainly entitled to rest and relaxation, what he is not entitled to during the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression is hypocrisy.

“Fresh from his State of the Union speech on Tuesday and a speaking tour focusing on how he plans to lift up the poor and middle class, the President flew on Friday evening to the Floridian Yacht & Golf Club in Palm City, Florida, a millionaire’s golfing enclave where cottages rent for $1500 a night and golf lessons can run $3,000 an hour. The initiation fee is a one-time payment of $50,000 and annual dues are $15,000. The facility includes a 61-foot yacht.”

The press was barred from the enclave and prevented from observing with whom the President was hobnobbing.

Had mainstream media not been wearing blinders when it came to Barack Obama, it might have noticed how he staffed up his administrations. As we reported regarding Obama’s second term:

“President Obama might as well drape the White House with a giant banner declaring in bold red type: ‘Drop Dead 99 Percent.’

“A pattern is emerging in the nominations coming out of the Oval Office. If you’ve played a role in collapsing a major bank, the President has a top slot for you. But only millionaires and billionaires need apply. Union busting scores extra points.

“Jack Lew was paid millions as Chief Operating Officer for the very division of Citigroup that collapsed the bank in 2008 and Jack Lew is nominated by the President for U.S. Treasury Secretary. Before that, Lew played a key role in busting a grad students union at New York University. [Lew did become Treasury Secretary.]

“Billionaire Penny Pritzker was involved in the collapse of the Superior Bank of Illinois, a Chicago savings and loan that went belly up in 2001 and now, according to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, Pritzker is on the short list to become the next U.S. Commerce Secretary. [She did become Commerce Secretary.]

“Of course, there are other ways to get a salary and a pension from the taxpayer and play a leadership role in pulling the country out of the greatest banking collapse since the Great Depression. Obama is nothing if not an equal opportunity employer of opportunists. If you didn’t personally collapse anything but were white collar defense lawyer to those that did, you can become the head of Wall Street’s regulator. Mary Jo White, partner at corporate law firm Debevoise and Plimpton, whose clients include JPMorgan, UBS, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, has been nominated by the President to head the Securities and Exchange Commission.” [White did become SEC Chair and failed spectacularly at the job.]

The former First Lady, Michelle Obama, who famously said “When they go low, we go high,” must have been thinking about fashion price tags. As we wrote on March 25, 2013:

“During the Great Depression, the President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was rapidly creating programs to address joblessness, poverty and the plight of the homeless. The First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, traveled tens of thousands of miles around the country, year after year, to check on those programs and report back to the public in a syndicated column she wrote six days a week titled ‘My Day.’

“In the Great Recession, with 46.2 million Americans living in poverty, including one in every five children according to the U.S. Census Bureau, President Obama is spending his weekends in the Middle East or at a millionaire’s golf club while First Lady Michelle Obama adorns the current issue of Vogue wearing designer clothes costing more than it would take to feed a family of four for a year. This comes on the heels of the First Lady’s February 24th appearance by satellite in another designer gown (a silver, custom beaded tulle by Naeem Khan) to present the best picture award at the Oscars.”

A handful of us were on to Obama from the start. Bruce Dixon was the Managing Editor of the Black Agenda Report in 2008, during Obama’s first presidential campaign. The Black Agenda Report is a political journal for black Americans. Dixon wrote the following in February 2008:

“Whether it is truly possible to hold elected officials accountable in a political system where big money, big media, big corporations and the very rich call all the shots is uncertain. But we have tried and will keep trying. So will others. The stakes are too high not to…

“The 2008 Obama presidential run may be the most slickly orchestrated marketing machine in memory. That’s not a good thing. Marketing is not even distantly related to democracy or civic empowerment. Marketing is about creating emotional, even irrational bonds between your product and your target audience. From its Bloody Sunday 2007 proclamation that Obama was the second coming of Joshua to its nationally televised kickoff at Abe Lincoln’s tomb to the tens of millions of dollars in breathless free media coverage lavished on it by the establishment media, the campaign’s deft manipulation of hopeful themes and emotionally potent symbols has led many to impute their own cherished views to Obama, whether he endorses them or not.”

CounterPunch published the book, Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion. It was an anthology of articles on the red flags in the Obama candidacy. CounterPunch editors, Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank, describe the books as follows:

“The election of Barack Obama sparked long-dormant tingles of optimism in even the most entrenched political cynics. But the promise of an Obama revolution fizzled out even before his inauguration, as the president-in-waiting stocked his cabinet with corporate hacks, cut secret deals with Wall Street titans and plotted a bloody escalation of the senseless war in Afghanistan. Let this book stand as a painful reminder to those who think anything less than social struggle will net tangible gain.”

One of our articles, penned in May of 2008, appears in Hopeless. In it, we write this:

“The Wall Street plan for the Obama-bubble presidency is that of the cleanup crew for the housing bubble: sweep all the corruption and losses, would-be indictments, perp walks and prosecutions under the rug and get on with an unprecedented taxpayer bailout of Wall Street. (The corporate law firms have piled on to funding the plan because most were up to their eyeballs in writing prospectuses or providing legal opinions for what has turned out to be bogus AAA securities. Lawsuits naming the Wall Street firms will, no doubt, shortly begin adding the law firms that rendered the legal guidance to issue the securities.) Who better to sell this agenda to the millions of duped mortgage holders and foreclosed homeowners in minority communities across America than our first, beloved, black president of hope and change?”

@QMS All around the world.

Not in NYC as far as I know. My grandson and I went out to brunch and all is quiet in Tribeca. Sunny and mild. He started work at Deloitte and i asked him if he knew what BRICS is. and no, of course he didn't.

After we spent some time looking at old family fotos and he left I wrote up a list of BRICS countries, BRICS applicants---thank you QMS and the date of the next BRICS Summit, this summer. Using red and blue narrow marking pens, which is pretty much all I can see these days.

We will see each other again next Sunday, Inshallah and I will try to fill him in on what is actually happening in the world outside of the 1% bubble of the media.

Harrison is all ears fascinated by my alternative view of reality. I want him and his sister, Olivia, and their mother, my beloved daughter, Elyse, to survive what's coming.

Israel
France
South Korea
Hong Kong
Germany
Lebanon
India
Georgia
(not including CIA fomented coups)
US ??
Greece
Sweden
Spain
Guatamala
Kenya
South Africa
Nigeria
Tunisia
Senegal
Brazil
Peru
Uruguay
...

(note US not tracked on this one)

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/30/mapping-major-protests-around-t...

also

https://carnegieendowment.org/publications/interactive/protest-tracker

The natives are getting restless, many different issues
Mostly anti-government

@MrWebster

And a history of fighting Afghan wedding parties

And of course the double tap bombings for the people who come to the aid of those at the weddings that we bombed. Remember the discussions on the use of drones and cowardly it is to use them?

They save our troop’s lives so why shouldn’t we use them?

How about our troops have no business being thousands of miles away from their country and committing war crimes in the first place?

And remember that Russia has been out of weapons since the 2nd week of the war? Lol…. Zelensky has been begging for more weapons since the 2nd week of the war, but sure it’s Russia that actually has. Good grief there has been so much propaganda shoveled on to western minds I can’t understand how they can’t see it.

Zelensky Admits Ukraine Already Ran Out Of Ammo

Zelensky’s latest damning admission. In an interview with Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, he candidly told his interlocutors that “We do not have ammunition. For us the situation in the East is not good.”

This is a major revelation for several reasons. First, it proves that Russia is winning NATO’s self-declared “race of logistics” in the sense that its armed forces still have ammo to continue fighting while the West’s Ukrainian proxies already ran out of that which their patrons provided over the past year. Second, the aforesaid aid that was already extended to this crumbling former Soviet Republic exceeds $100 billion, which makes Russia’s leading position in this “race of logistics” all the more impressive.

Third, Zelensky’s admission adds credence to what the Washington Post recently reported regarding how poorly Kiev’s forces are faring in this conflict, especially its “severe ammunition shortages” that one of its sources spoke about. Fourth, the preceding points drastically decrease the chances that Kiev’s upcoming counteroffensive will achieve much of anything and actually make it increasingly likely that such a move would be an epic mistake that could ultimately lead to a decisive Russian breakthrough.

And finally, it can therefore be expected that Zelensky and his agents of influence across the West will beg for even more aid, arguing that the failure to pay up would risking making their prior investments in this proxy war all for naught if Kiev ends up losing to Russia. The problem, however, is that no amount of money can make ammunition appear out of thin air since it requires a lot of time to scale production accordingly to meet these newfound exorbitant needs.

The very fact that Ukraine is out of ammunition proves that the West’s defeat in its self-declared “race of logistics” with Russia might already be a fait accompli by this point since it’s clear that Kiev can’t keep pace with its opponent despite being backed by all of NATO’s military-industrial capacity. Zelensky almost certainly didn’t realize that his candid admission essentially amounted to this, but it’s presently unclear whether the MSM will inform their audience about this or not.

How insane was it to offshore our manufacturing industry to China and then plan to go to war with them? We can’t make enough weapons to keep Ukraine supplied and with lots of countries helping us with that so how in hell do we think that we can win a war with the country that we rely on to make our weapons? Has any of the brains planning this thought that through?

Not a military guy, but I did get from CNN for $25 my official CNN Armchair Warrior rank of Major. Western delusion will get us to a war. Having paid close attention and trying to find pundits who know that they are talking about, NATO/US cannot win a war with Russia without resorting to nukes. Israel cannot win a war with Iran without resorting to nukes. Hell, France admitted they have only enough munitions for three weeks of high intensity warfare. The reasons are many which people on this site have heard like a corrupted MIC which cannot produce reliable weapons systems, forget just basic ammunition. And a history of fighting Afghan wedding parties and crumbling militaries thinking they are military badasses.

But the self delusion is that Western militaries are super duper invincible. The constant propaganda trying to portray Russian, Iranian, and China as incompetent is part of that narrative building. If there is a direct confrontation and the West gets a serious bloody nose, then the possibility of nukes.

@ban nock

One of our major antagonists has been militarily emasculated for a generation.

Ukraine had 8 years to get ready for the planned war with Russia and they had built up the places to defend against Russian forces and yet they still have been defeated 3 times already. They are only able to continue fighting because of how much we have been supporting them. Russia wiped out their air forces in the first week as well as their navy which is why they have to depend on our inferior weapons to try defend themselves. And just yesterday Zelensky bitched about not having enough weapons to take back the territory Russia has captured.

Russia’s economy is doing a hell of a lot better than ours and especially better than Germany and most of the EU states.

As for this:

There's no such thing as a good war, but this one is not so bad. All at no cost in US lives and not much cost in treasure compared to the fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It hasn’t been Russia who has to resort to kidnapping people off the streets to go fight the war without adequate training or weapons that can stand up against Russia’s artillery and air forces. But if you think it’s worth it to see close to 300,000 casualties from Ukraine I don’t know what to say except ick! Zelensky is sacrificing his citizens for a war that everyone knows that he can’t win. Russian casualties are much lower than Ukraine’s. And you aren’t hearing about the number of deaths from the US citizens that are fighting in mercenary armies and coming home in body bags. 40 NATO troops were recently killed in one of Russia bomb attacks on their drone headquarters. This was posted here a few weeks ago.

Again maybe you should start reading about the truth of the war instead of the ones that have been lying to you.

I see that you are still reading the same propaganda sites that are constantly lying to you about how well the war is going. Won’t you be surprised when Zelensky has to sue for peace? I just posted how he is once again begging for weapons because his troops are out of them again.

they will be at the outer ring road to Moscow.

There's no such thing as a good war, but this one is not so bad. One of our major antagonists has been militarily emasculated for a generation. Russia's aggression has caused bordering countries to make common cause and Norway and Sweden to join Nato followed by ukraine when they regain territorial integrity. All at no cost in US lives and not much cost in treasure compared to the fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan.

China is happy to buy cheap oil, but reluctant to adventure into a similar quagmire against a much more difficult Taiwan. And best of all, China is not supplying Russia with weapons or ammo. Russia's reliance on importing capital goods (things used to make other things) has bitten them in the butt.

My only wish is that congress would fight inflation by raising taxes instead of the Fed raising rates.

@humphrey in Israel, but Ben the Yahoo has exceeded all my expectations.
Protest, people! Keep it up!

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has fired his defense minister, a day after Yoav Gallant called for a halt to the planned overhaul of Israel’s judiciary that has fiercely divided the country. https://t.co/VTADSWr9rW

— The Associated Press (@AP) March 26, 2023

LIVE: Israelis in Tel Aviv protest against PM decision to dismiss his defense minister https://t.co/AIsv3bYJ9M

— Reuters (@Reuters) March 26, 2023