My daughter was doing her homework and asked me what I knew about Galileo.
I told her that he was just a poor boy, from a poor family.
*.*
What is the preferred pizza place for epileptic midgets?
Little Seizures.
*.*
Oneliners:
My super-power is holding on to junk for years and then throwing it away a week before I need it.
I have to say that flipping off a driverless vehicle is not nearly as satisfying.
I really need to get in shape, I realized today that if I was murdered, my chalk outline would be a circle.
Don't you hate it when you try to make a protein shake and you accidentally make a Margarita?
I had a hen that could count her own eggs; she was a mathmachicken.
Today's Work At Home Tip: Blowing on your wine in your mug will make people believe your tea is really hot.
Stop blaming everyone for your problems; find one person you hate and just blame them!
I just printed on a wireless printer and now I'm wondering which neighbor got the document.
I am not 40 years old; I'm 18 with 22 years experience.
I am not a complete idiot; some parts are missing.
*.*
Might wake up early and go running tomorrow.
I also might win the lottery.
Odds are about the same.
*.*
Walking past a new employee's desk & yelling, "Do you think it's a good idea to be surfing porn on your first day?" will never get old.
Quote of the Times;
The way to crush the middle class is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation. – Lenin
Link of the Times;
https://quoththeraven.substack.com/p/while-you-werent-paying-attention
Issue of the Times;
Biden's Handlers Want Skyrocketing Gas Prices. The EPA Just Revealed Why. by Robert Spencer
The Democrats are well aware of the old adage, “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” and are busy applying it as gas prices spiral out of all control. As PJM’s Chris Queen discussed Monday, Transportation Secretary Pete “Mr. Mom” Buttigieg appeared to be fantastically out of touch when he responded to skyrocketing prices at the pump. “Clean transportation can bring significant cost savings for the American people as well,” asserted Buttigieg. “Last month, we announced a $5 billion investment to build out a nationwide electric vehicle charging network so that people from rural to suburban to urban communities can all benefit from the gas savings of driving an EV.”
It was a real “Let Them Eat Cake” moment for Secretary Pete, but there is a method to his madness: the administration isn’t just out of touch, it is actively trying to use this crisis to impose its green agenda. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Michael Regan confirmed that on Monday.
The Sacramento Bee reported that Regan was at the White House, along with Buttigieg and alleged Vice President Kamala Harris, to announce “proposed limits on new buses and large trucks to curb some of their greenhouse gas emissions by up to 90% in the next decade.” In the course of his remarks, Regan boasted, “We’re pressing the accelerator to reach a zero-emissions future sooner than most people thought.”
Nothing presses the accelerator to reach a zero-emissions future more effectively than gas prices rising so high that driving a carbon-emitting car is simply too expensive.
At the Monday White House event, Harris was likewise enthusiastic, saying, “We are all in the midst of a turning point. We have the technology to transition to a zero-emission fleet. We can address the climate crisis and grow our economy at the same time.”
We are all in the midst of a turning point, and the green energy forces are not going to let it go to waste. On Tuesday, Old Joe Biden said that the situation was going to get worse, as prices are “gonna go up,” and that he couldn’t do anything about it. “Can’t do much right now. Russia’s responsible.” Biden also risibly claimed that “It’s simply not true that my administration or policies are holding back domestic energy production.”
How is it possible that the president of the United States could be such a shameless liar and constantly get a pass for it from the establishment media? In lying so brazenly, Biden must know that no “journalist” will challenge him, and he must also have such a low opinion of the American people that he assumes most will not realize he is lying. On that score, he may be at least partially right: it’s likely many Americans don’t know that Biden promised, during a presidential debate, that he would “transition away from the oil industry.”
Related: Buttigieg Says the Solution to High Gas Prices Is Simple: Just Buy an EV
Old Joe delivered right away, shutting down the Keystone Pipeline, placing a moratorium on oil leases on federal property (which was blocked in court but is apparently still followed in the Interior Department, as the number of drilling permits it has issued has dropped sharply), suspending some existing drilling leases, restricting fracking, placing onerous financial regulations on the oil industry, and more. Now, his handlers have made it clear that they have no intention of revisiting any of this, but instead are looking into buying oil from tyrannical rogue states such as Venezuela and Iran.
It looks as if Biden’s handlers will do anything but relieve the plight of the American people, the plight that they themselves created. If they did ease up on their restrictions on the domestic oil industry and restart work on the Keystone Pipeline, they would face the wrath of the far-Left greens who constitute the great bulk of their base, and it is clear that Biden’s handlers will do anything but cross them. Instead, they’re using this crisis as an opportunity to try to foist their green agenda on the American people, while we have no choice but to go along.
Regan is right: the administration is pedal-to-the-metal on its zero-emissions agenda, and with gas rapidly becoming too expensive to purchase, we are all greens now. After all, the line between abject poverty and environmental consciousness has always been exceedingly thin.
News of the Times;
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/03/17/jen-psaki-repeatedly-spread-disinformation-about-hunter-bidens-laptop/
https://newspunch.com/putin-new-world-order-are-deliberately-crashing-the-economy-as-part-of-the-great-reset/
https://ac.news/kirstie-alley-hollywood-is-a-vipers-nest-of-elite-pedophiles/
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/pizza-hut-teaches-kids-america-built-slavery-and-daniel-greenfield/
https://vdare.com/posts/netflix-s-vikings-valhalla-turns-white-ruler-of-norway-in-975-a-d-into-a-black-viking-warrior-queen
https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/non-whites-commit-96-1-percent-of-homicides-and-97-8-percent-of-shootings-in-nyc-in-2021/
https://www.breitbart.com/border/2022/03/05/ten-human-smugglers-busted-in-six-hours-near-border-in-texas/
https://www.commentary.org/articles/christine-rosen/new-york-times-weddings-section/
https://worthypolitics.com/must-see-this-is-huge-insane-levels-of-fraud-breaking-news-new-investigation-finds-additional-740000-ballots-with-no-documented-chain-of-custody-invalid-ballots-maricopa-county/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/10/must-read-ukraine-burisma-story-is-massive-involves-billions-of-imf-and-us-funds-looted-and-lost-by-bank-connected-to-burisma-holdings/
https://justthenews.com/government/security/insecure-border-spreads-lethal-crime-americas-heartland-creating-powerful
https://cwbchicago.com/2022/03/10-an-11-time-convicted-felon-shot-a-3-year-old-and-tried-to-kill-the-boys-mother-while-on-felony-bail-prosecutors-say.html
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/breaking-four-west-point-cadets-overdose-fentanyl-laced-cocaine-vrbo-ft-lauderdale-two-cadets-hospitalized-giving-mouth-mouth/
https://washingtonews.today/index.php/2022/03/16/jill-biden-steps-in-to-correct-joe-biden-after-he-called-kamala-harris-the-first-lady/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soWl68xoqeY
Gas?
Brace?
I haven't even gone to bed yet and I already can't wait to get home from work tomorrow.
*.*
I feel sick every time I fill my tank.
I'm worried I mighta caught that CarOwner Virus people have been talking about!
*.*
The trial went on for 4 weeks with testimony by both sides.
Finally, the jury retired to determine the verdict.
Despite a convincing prosecution, after 2 days the jury had reached a decision to acquit the prisoner.
Judge: "What possible reason could you have for acquitting the prisoner?"
Foreman: "Insanity, sir."
Judge: "What, all twelve of you?"
*.*
ME: What does "competitive salary" mean?
BOSS: It means your salary will be competing with your bills.
*.*
Russia has banned Facebook.
They're just trying to make us think they're not all bad.
Quote of the Times;
"Republicans refused to give Donald Trump $4B for a Border Wall for four years, but they gave Joe Biden $14B for Ukrainian aid in a week. What does that say about the priorities of congressional Republicans?" – Vance
Link of the Times;
https://rairfoundation.com/journalist-inside-eastern-ukraine-people-here-are-extremely-grateful-russia-finally-did-something-video/
Issue of the Times;
Brace yourself for fertilizer and food shortages by Patrice Lewis
I've been following the issue of supply-chain shortages carefully. Of all the stories that have plagued the news over the last two years, one of the most disturbing was a piece I read last November entitled "Fertilizer Shortages Could Become the Death Knell for Global Food Production."
Normally I dismiss the scare factor in these kinds of doom 'n' gloom articles; but as someone involved in small-scale homesteading, this one caught my attention.
"The production of fertilizers has stopped for various reasons and prices have reached record highs," begins the article. "Sky-high prices for electricity and transport will have a major impact on food prices, but fertilizer shortages risk knocking out large parts of global food production. The consequences could be grave."
How grave? As it turns out, very grave.
Fertilizer factories across Europe have been closing down their operations due to the high costs of natural gas, which is used in production. In America, fertilizer production and availability have been crippled by everything from hurricanes hitting the Gulf Coast to fires in fertilizer plants (North Carolina and Washington) to (oddly) train derailments (Iowa and Minnesota). In short, fertilizer is a lot scarcer and more expensive than before.
Recently, Fox's Tucker Carlson interviewed a farmer named Ben Riensche, the owner of Blue Diamond Farming Company in Iowa and a farmer of 16,000 acres in that state. Riensche crunched numbers to illustrate the direct correlation between fertilizer availability and prices, and food availability and prices. Then he said something startling: "If you're upset that gas is up a dollar or two a gallon, wait until your grocery bill is up $1,000 a month, and it might not just manifest itself in terms of price. It could be quantity as well. Empty-shelf syndrome may be starting." (It's worth noting that Carlson was so staggered by this information, he asked Riensche to repeat and confirm that prediction.)
Americans are already dealing with skyrocketing inflation, and food prices are up 24% over just the past year. Large-scale commercial food production, it must be pointed out, is intimately connected to the large-scale availability of commercial fertilizer.
And who are two of the biggest exporters of fertilizer in the world? You guessed it, China and Russia. Last year, China (the world's top fertilizer exporter) banned exports of phosphate until June 2022. That alone put an enormous crimp on the world's supply of fertilizer.
"In August 2021," notes this article, "fertilizer prices were expected to go up by 10 percent. By January, the predicted increase rose to 80 percent. … Like it or not, the world economy is tightly interconnected."
As if this weren't bad enough, Russia invaded Ukraine. Crop-wise, these two countries account for about 30% of world wheat exports, 19% of corn exports and a staggering 80% of sunflower oil. The invasion has choked off more than a quarter of the global wheat trade, about a fifth of corn, and 12% of all calories traded globally. Any guess what this conflict will mean for the availability and prices of these commodities?
Then Vladimir Putin, in his infinite wisdom, threatened to crash world food supply by withholding fertilizer. Russia produces 13% of the world supply of potash, phosphate and nitrogen for fertilizer. It's tempting to dismiss this threat as hyperbole, but Putin isn't known for his sense of humor. It's best to take his threats seriously. He followed through on Thursday, when Russian Minister of Industry and Trade Denis Manturov said Russia decided to suspend fertilizer exports. Putin is a desperate man, desperate to justify his invasion of Ukraine on the world stage. Desperate men do desperate things.
Europe, already on edge over the conflict, is circling the wagons when it comes to food. Hungary – one of Europe's most grain-rich nations – is banning all grain exports effective immediately. Ukraine has done the same.
In some ways, a shortage of fertilizer is one of the biggest issues the world faces – and that includes war, threats of war, inflation, COVID, rising crime and a host of other current ills. That's because food is a universal requirement and an immediate need. Starvation is a common tactic of tyrants (just ask the Ukrainians). Alfred Henry Lewis said it best: "There are only nine meals between humanity and anarchy."
Modern agriculture is scarily, frighteningly, dependent on commercial fertilizers to feed the world. "Half the world's population gets food as a result of fertilizers … and if that's removed from the field for some crops, [the yield] will drop by 50%," Svein Tore Holsether, head of agri company Yara International, told the BBC.
For a multitude of reasons, it's like we're having this "perfect storm" of issues facing world agriculture. Weather, storms, droughts, pandemics, supply-chain problems, conflicts, fertilizer shortages – the list goes on and on. As a result, countries are moving into a stage called "food protectionism." This is an every-man-for-himself position where exports are severely curtailed or halted, and imports are ramped up (if possible) to try and make sure each nation can feed its people.
"Governments are taking steps to safeguard domestic food supplies after Russia's invasion of Ukraine roiled trade and sent prices of key staples skyrocketing," notes Bloomberg. "Protectionist measures, which have already picked up in recent years as the Covid-19 pandemic spurred concerns about shortages, could spell more bad news for global food trade and add pressure to food inflation. … Indonesia, the world's biggest exporter of edible oils, will tighten its control over shipments in a sign of growing protectionism around the world as countries grapple with soaring food prices. … Other countries that have taken to food protectionism include Hungary, which is banning grain exports. Argentina and Turkey also made recent moves to boost their control over local products. Moldova, albeit a small shipper, has temporarily halted exports of wheat, corn and sugar."
As someone once put it, "When the bread runs out, the circus won't be enough."
News of the Times;
https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/04/covid-vaccine-bombshells-you-probably-didnt-hear-about/
https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/07/mississippi-audit-hundreds-of-thousands-of-mark-zuckerbergs-election-funds-were-stolen-and-misused/
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2022/03/law-student-complains-about-a-question-professor-sentenced-to-re-education-camp/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/shooter-others-involved-gunning-innocent-trump-supporter-denver-whose-charges-dropped/
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2021/11/08/biden-looking-at-shutting-down-another-pipeline-as-winter-approaches-n427703
https://www.theorganicprepper.com/russia-internet-quarantine/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/hate-hoax-black-lives-matter-operatives-convicted-arson-vandalism-attempting-frame-conservatives-crimes/
https://www.thecollegefix.com/student-editor-begs-his-university-not-to-hire-another-white-male-as-vice-chancellor/
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/chris-queen/2022/03/13/what-have-two-years-of-two-weeks-to-slow-the-spread-taught-us-n1565330
https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2022/03/08/the-morning-briefing-tone-deaf-team-biden-responds-to-high-gas-prices-with-electric-car-sales-pitch-n1564558
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/not-just-wuhan-document-shows-us-military-funding-bioresearch-coronavirus-insectivorous-bats-ukraine/
https://www.westernjournal.com/outrage-biden-gives-soros-nonprofit-164-million-help-criminal-migrants-escape-punishment/
https://reason.com/volokh/2022/03/08/straights-need-not-apply-for-city-of-west-hollywood-guaranteed-income-pilot-project/
https://thenationalpulse.com/2022/03/06/democrat-mayor-charged-with-child-porn-possession/
https://nypost.com/2022/03/02/poop-attack-perp-jokes-s-t-happens-after-arrest/
*.*
I feel sick every time I fill my tank.
I'm worried I mighta caught that CarOwner Virus people have been talking about!
*.*
The trial went on for 4 weeks with testimony by both sides.
Finally, the jury retired to determine the verdict.
Despite a convincing prosecution, after 2 days the jury had reached a decision to acquit the prisoner.
Judge: "What possible reason could you have for acquitting the prisoner?"
Foreman: "Insanity, sir."
Judge: "What, all twelve of you?"
*.*
ME: What does "competitive salary" mean?
BOSS: It means your salary will be competing with your bills.
*.*
Russia has banned Facebook.
They're just trying to make us think they're not all bad.
Quote of the Times;
"Republicans refused to give Donald Trump $4B for a Border Wall for four years, but they gave Joe Biden $14B for Ukrainian aid in a week. What does that say about the priorities of congressional Republicans?" – Vance
Link of the Times;
https://rairfoundation.com/journalist-inside-eastern-ukraine-people-here-are-extremely-grateful-russia-finally-did-something-video/
Issue of the Times;
Brace yourself for fertilizer and food shortages by Patrice Lewis
I've been following the issue of supply-chain shortages carefully. Of all the stories that have plagued the news over the last two years, one of the most disturbing was a piece I read last November entitled "Fertilizer Shortages Could Become the Death Knell for Global Food Production."
Normally I dismiss the scare factor in these kinds of doom 'n' gloom articles; but as someone involved in small-scale homesteading, this one caught my attention.
"The production of fertilizers has stopped for various reasons and prices have reached record highs," begins the article. "Sky-high prices for electricity and transport will have a major impact on food prices, but fertilizer shortages risk knocking out large parts of global food production. The consequences could be grave."
How grave? As it turns out, very grave.
Fertilizer factories across Europe have been closing down their operations due to the high costs of natural gas, which is used in production. In America, fertilizer production and availability have been crippled by everything from hurricanes hitting the Gulf Coast to fires in fertilizer plants (North Carolina and Washington) to (oddly) train derailments (Iowa and Minnesota). In short, fertilizer is a lot scarcer and more expensive than before.
Recently, Fox's Tucker Carlson interviewed a farmer named Ben Riensche, the owner of Blue Diamond Farming Company in Iowa and a farmer of 16,000 acres in that state. Riensche crunched numbers to illustrate the direct correlation between fertilizer availability and prices, and food availability and prices. Then he said something startling: "If you're upset that gas is up a dollar or two a gallon, wait until your grocery bill is up $1,000 a month, and it might not just manifest itself in terms of price. It could be quantity as well. Empty-shelf syndrome may be starting." (It's worth noting that Carlson was so staggered by this information, he asked Riensche to repeat and confirm that prediction.)
Americans are already dealing with skyrocketing inflation, and food prices are up 24% over just the past year. Large-scale commercial food production, it must be pointed out, is intimately connected to the large-scale availability of commercial fertilizer.
And who are two of the biggest exporters of fertilizer in the world? You guessed it, China and Russia. Last year, China (the world's top fertilizer exporter) banned exports of phosphate until June 2022. That alone put an enormous crimp on the world's supply of fertilizer.
"In August 2021," notes this article, "fertilizer prices were expected to go up by 10 percent. By January, the predicted increase rose to 80 percent. … Like it or not, the world economy is tightly interconnected."
As if this weren't bad enough, Russia invaded Ukraine. Crop-wise, these two countries account for about 30% of world wheat exports, 19% of corn exports and a staggering 80% of sunflower oil. The invasion has choked off more than a quarter of the global wheat trade, about a fifth of corn, and 12% of all calories traded globally. Any guess what this conflict will mean for the availability and prices of these commodities?
Then Vladimir Putin, in his infinite wisdom, threatened to crash world food supply by withholding fertilizer. Russia produces 13% of the world supply of potash, phosphate and nitrogen for fertilizer. It's tempting to dismiss this threat as hyperbole, but Putin isn't known for his sense of humor. It's best to take his threats seriously. He followed through on Thursday, when Russian Minister of Industry and Trade Denis Manturov said Russia decided to suspend fertilizer exports. Putin is a desperate man, desperate to justify his invasion of Ukraine on the world stage. Desperate men do desperate things.
Europe, already on edge over the conflict, is circling the wagons when it comes to food. Hungary – one of Europe's most grain-rich nations – is banning all grain exports effective immediately. Ukraine has done the same.
In some ways, a shortage of fertilizer is one of the biggest issues the world faces – and that includes war, threats of war, inflation, COVID, rising crime and a host of other current ills. That's because food is a universal requirement and an immediate need. Starvation is a common tactic of tyrants (just ask the Ukrainians). Alfred Henry Lewis said it best: "There are only nine meals between humanity and anarchy."
Modern agriculture is scarily, frighteningly, dependent on commercial fertilizers to feed the world. "Half the world's population gets food as a result of fertilizers … and if that's removed from the field for some crops, [the yield] will drop by 50%," Svein Tore Holsether, head of agri company Yara International, told the BBC.
For a multitude of reasons, it's like we're having this "perfect storm" of issues facing world agriculture. Weather, storms, droughts, pandemics, supply-chain problems, conflicts, fertilizer shortages – the list goes on and on. As a result, countries are moving into a stage called "food protectionism." This is an every-man-for-himself position where exports are severely curtailed or halted, and imports are ramped up (if possible) to try and make sure each nation can feed its people.
"Governments are taking steps to safeguard domestic food supplies after Russia's invasion of Ukraine roiled trade and sent prices of key staples skyrocketing," notes Bloomberg. "Protectionist measures, which have already picked up in recent years as the Covid-19 pandemic spurred concerns about shortages, could spell more bad news for global food trade and add pressure to food inflation. … Indonesia, the world's biggest exporter of edible oils, will tighten its control over shipments in a sign of growing protectionism around the world as countries grapple with soaring food prices. … Other countries that have taken to food protectionism include Hungary, which is banning grain exports. Argentina and Turkey also made recent moves to boost their control over local products. Moldova, albeit a small shipper, has temporarily halted exports of wheat, corn and sugar."
As someone once put it, "When the bread runs out, the circus won't be enough."
News of the Times;
https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/04/covid-vaccine-bombshells-you-probably-didnt-hear-about/
https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/07/mississippi-audit-hundreds-of-thousands-of-mark-zuckerbergs-election-funds-were-stolen-and-misused/
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2022/03/law-student-complains-about-a-question-professor-sentenced-to-re-education-camp/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/shooter-others-involved-gunning-innocent-trump-supporter-denver-whose-charges-dropped/
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2021/11/08/biden-looking-at-shutting-down-another-pipeline-as-winter-approaches-n427703
https://www.theorganicprepper.com/russia-internet-quarantine/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/hate-hoax-black-lives-matter-operatives-convicted-arson-vandalism-attempting-frame-conservatives-crimes/
https://www.thecollegefix.com/student-editor-begs-his-university-not-to-hire-another-white-male-as-vice-chancellor/
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/chris-queen/2022/03/13/what-have-two-years-of-two-weeks-to-slow-the-spread-taught-us-n1565330
https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2022/03/08/the-morning-briefing-tone-deaf-team-biden-responds-to-high-gas-prices-with-electric-car-sales-pitch-n1564558
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/not-just-wuhan-document-shows-us-military-funding-bioresearch-coronavirus-insectivorous-bats-ukraine/
https://www.westernjournal.com/outrage-biden-gives-soros-nonprofit-164-million-help-criminal-migrants-escape-punishment/
https://reason.com/volokh/2022/03/08/straights-need-not-apply-for-city-of-west-hollywood-guaranteed-income-pilot-project/
https://thenationalpulse.com/2022/03/06/democrat-mayor-charged-with-child-porn-possession/
https://nypost.com/2022/03/02/poop-attack-perp-jokes-s-t-happens-after-arrest/
Huning?
My wife asked me why I was doing the dishes while sitting down.
Told her it's because I can't stand doing it.
*.*
My friends from New York talk about how tough their schools were.
I’m not impressed.
I'm from Texas.
My school had its own coroner.
We used to write essays like: “What I want to be IF I grow up...”
*.*
At the doctor's waiting room a man was sitting opposite a mother and her little daughter.
He asks the little girl, "Hi there, and how old are you?"
The little girl showed him 4 fingers to indicate she is 4 years old.
The man says, "That is nice, but can't you talk?"
The little girl replies, "Yes I can, can't you count?"
*.*
I fell asleep last night reading old magazines.
Woke up this morning with back issues.
*.*
Everyone, please don't ride with me if you're going to scream and grab the dashboard every time I run off the road.
It makes me nervous.
Quote of the Times;
“Reliance on a single foreign supplier can leave a nation vulnerable to extortion and intimidation. That’s why we congratulate European states such as Poland for leading the construction of a Baltic pipeline so that nations are not dependent on Russia to meet their energy needs. Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course. Here in the Western Hemisphere, we are committed to maintaining our independence from the encroachment of expansionist foreign powers.” – President Trump in 2018
Link of the Times;
https://news.gab.com/2022/02/25/gab-go-and-build/
Issue of the Times;
The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning by N.S. Lyons
One day in August 2021, Zhao Wei disappeared. For one of China’s best-known actresses to physically vanish from public view would have been enough to cause a stir on its own. But Zhao’s disappearing act was far more thorough: overnight, she was erased from the internet. Her Weibo social media page, with its 86 million followers, went offline, as did fan sites dedicated to her. Searches for her many films and television shows returned no results on streaming sites. Zhao’s name was scrubbed from the credits of projects she had appeared in or directed, replaced with a blank space. Online discussions uttering her name were censored. Suddenly, little trace remained that the 45-year-old celebrity had ever existed.
She wasn’t alone. Other Chinese entertainers also began to vanish as Chinese government regulators announced a “heightened crackdown” intended to dispense with “vulgar internet celebrities” promoting lascivious lifestyles and to “resolve the problem of chaos” created by online fandom culture. Those imitating the effeminate or androgynous aesthetics of Korean boyband stars—colorfully referred to as “xiao xian rou,” or “little fresh meat”—were next to go, with the government vowing to “resolutely put an end to sissy men” appearing on the screens of China’s impressionable youth.
Zhao and her unfortunate compatriots in the entertainment industry were caught up in something far larger than themselves: a sudden wave of new government policies that are currently upending Chinese life in what state media has characterized as a “profound transformation” of the country. Officially referred to as Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “Common Prosperity” campaign, this transformation is proceeding along two parallel lines: a vast regulatory crackdown roiling the private sector economy and a broader moralistic effort to reengineer Chinese culture from the top down.
But why is this “profound transformation” happening? And why now? Most analysis has focused on one man: Xi and his seemingly endless personal obsession with political control. The overlooked answer, however, is that this is indeed the culmination of decades of thinking and planning by a very powerful man—but that man is not Xi Jinping.
The Grey Eminence
Wang Huning much prefers the shadows to the limelight. An insomniac and workaholic, former friends and colleagues describe the bespectacled, soft-spoken political theorist as introverted and obsessively discreet. It took former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin’s repeated entreaties to convince the brilliant then-young academic—who spoke wistfully of following the traditional path of a Confucian scholar, aloof from politics—to give up academia in the early 1990s and join the Chinese Communist Party regime instead. When he finally did so, Wang cut off nearly all contact with his former connections, stopped publishing and speaking publicly, and implemented a strict policy of never speaking to foreigners at all. Behind this veil of carefully cultivated opacity, it’s unsurprising that so few people in the West know of Wang, let alone know him personally.
Yet Wang Huning is arguably the single most influential “public intellectual” alive today.
A member of the CCP’s seven-man Politburo Standing Committee, he is China’s top ideological theorist, quietly credited as being the “ideas man” behind each of Xi’s signature political concepts, including the “China Dream,” the anti-corruption campaign, the Belt and Road Initiative, a more assertive foreign policy, and even “Xi Jinping Thought.” Scrutinize any photograph of Xi on an important trip or at a key meeting and one is likely to spot Wang there in the background, never far from the leader’s side.
Wang has thus earned comparisons to famous figures of Chinese history like Zhuge Liang and Han Fei (historians dub the latter “China’s Machiavelli”) who similarly served behind the throne as powerful strategic advisers and consiglieres—a position referred to in Chinese literature as dishi: “Emperor’s Teacher.” Such a figure is just as readily recognizable in the West as an éminence grise (“grey eminence”), in the tradition of Tremblay, Talleyrand, Metternich, Kissinger, or Vladimir Putin adviser Vladislav Surkov.
But what is singularly remarkable about Wang is that he’s managed to serve in this role of court philosopher to not just one, but all three of China’s previous top leaders, including as the pen behind Jiang Zemin’s signature “Three Represents” policy and Hu Jintao’s “Harmonious Society.”
In the brutally cutthroat world of CCP factional politics, this is an unprecedented feat. Wang was recruited into the party by Jiang’s “Shanghai Gang,” a rival faction that Xi worked to ruthlessly purge after coming to power in 2012; many prominent members, like former security chief Zhou Yongkang and former vice security minister Sun Lijun, have ended up in prison. Meanwhile, Hu Jintao’s Communist Youth League Faction has also been heavily marginalized as Xi’s faction has consolidated control. Yet Wang Huning remains. More than any other, it is this fact that reveals the depth of his impeccable political cunning.
And the fingerprints of China’s Grey Eminence on the Common Prosperity campaign are unmistakable. While it’s hard to be certain what Wang really believes today inside his black box, he was once an immensely prolific author, publishing nearly 20 books along with numerous essays. And the obvious continuity between the thought in those works and what’s happening in China today says something fascinating about how Beijing has come to perceive the world through the eyes of Wang Huning.
Cultural Competence
While other Chinese teenagers spent the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) “sent down to the countryside” to dig ditches and work on farms, Wang Huning studied French at an elite foreign-language training school near his hometown of Shanghai, spending his days reading banned foreign literary classics secured for him by his teachers. Born in 1955 to a revolutionary family from Shandong, he was a sickly, bookish youth; this, along with his family’s connections, seems to have secured him a pass from hard labor.
When China’s shuttered universities reopened in 1978, following the commencement of “reform and opening” by Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping, Wang was among the first to take the restored national university entrance exam, competing with millions for a chance to return to higher learning. He passed so spectacularly that Shanghai’s Fudan University, one of China’s top institutions, admitted him into its prestigious international politics master’s program despite having never completed a bachelor’s degree.
The thesis work he completed at Fudan, which would become his first book, traced the development of the Western concept of national sovereignty from antiquity to the present day—including from Gilgamesh through Socrates, Aristotle, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Hegel, and Marx—and contrasted it with Chinese conceptions of the idea. The work would become the foundation for many of his future theories of the nation-state and international relations.
But Wang was also beginning to pick up the strands of what would become another core thread of his life’s work: the necessary centrality of culture, tradition, and value structures to political stability.
Wang elaborated on these ideas in a 1988 essay, “The Structure of China’s Changing Political Culture,” which would become one of his most cited works. In it, he argued that the CCP must urgently consider how society’s “software” (culture, values, attitudes) shapes political destiny as much as its “hardware” (economics, systems, institutions). While seemingly a straightforward idea, this was notably a daring break from the materialism of orthodox Marxism.
Examining China in the midst of Deng’s rapid opening to the world, Wang perceived a country “in a state of transformation” from “an economy of production to an economy of consumption,” while evolving “from a spiritually oriented culture to a materially oriented culture,” and “from a collectivist culture to an individualistic culture.”
Meanwhile, he believed that the modernization of “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” was effectively leaving China without any real cultural direction at all. “There are no core values in China’s most recent structure,” he warned. This could serve only to dissolve societal and political cohesion.
That, he said, was untenable. Warning that “the components of the political culture shaped by the Cultural Revolution came to be divorced from the source that gave birth to this culture, as well as from social demands, social values, and social relations”—and thus “the results of the adoption of Marxism were not always positive”—he argued that, “Since 1949, we have criticized the core values of the classical and modern structures, but have not paid enough attention to shaping our own core values.” Therefore: “we must create core values.” Ideally, he concluded, “We must combine the flexibility of [China’s] traditional values with the modern spirit [both Western and Marxist].”
But at this point, like many during those heady years of reform and opening, he remained hopeful that liberalism could play a positive role in China, writing that his recommendations could allow “the components of the modern structure that embody the spirit of modern democracy and humanism [to] find the support they need to take root and grow.”
That would soon change.
A Dark Vision
Also in 1988, Wang—having risen with unprecedented speed to become Fudan’s youngest full professor at age 30—won a coveted scholarship (facilitated by the American Political Science Association) to spend six months in the United States as a visiting scholar. Profoundly curious about America, Wang took full advantage, wandering about the country like a sort of latter-day Chinese Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting more than 30 cities and nearly 20 universities.
What he found deeply disturbed him, permanently shifting his view of the West and the consequences of its ideas.
Wang recorded his observations in a memoir that would become his most famous work: the 1991 book America Against America. In it, he marvels at homeless encampments in the streets of Washington DC, out-of-control drug crime in poor black neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco, and corporations that seemed to have fused themselves to and taken over responsibilities of government. Eventually, he concludes that America faces an “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis” produced by its societal contradictions, including between rich and poor, white and black, democratic and oligarchic power, egalitarianism and class privilege, individual rights and collective responsibilities, cultural traditions and the solvent of liquid modernity.
But while Americans can, he says, perceive that they are faced with “intricate social and cultural problems,” they “tend to think of them as scientific and technological problems” to be solved separately. This gets them nowhere, he argues, because their problems are in fact all inextricably interlinked and have the same root cause: a radical, nihilistic individualism at the heart of modern American liberalism.
“The real cell of society in the United States is the individual,” he finds. This is so because the cell most foundational (per Aristotle) to society, “the family, has disintegrated.” Meanwhile, in the American system, “everything has a dual nature, and the glamour of high commodification abounds. Human flesh, sex, knowledge, politics, power, and law can all become the target of commodification.” This “commodification, in many ways, corrupts society and leads to a number of serious social problems.” In the end, “the American economic system has created human loneliness” as its foremost product, along with spectacular inequality. As a result, “nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock to cultural development and the American spirit.”
Moreover, he says that the “American spirit is facing serious challenges” from new ideational competitors. Reflecting on the universities he visited and quoting approvingly from Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, he notes a growing tension between Enlightenment liberal rationalism and a “younger generation [that] is ignorant of traditional Western values” and actively rejects its cultural inheritance. “If the value system collapses,” he wonders, “how can the social system be sustained?”
Ultimately, he argues, when faced with critical social issues like drug addiction, America’s atomized, deracinated, and dispirited society has found itself with “an insurmountable problem” because it no longer has any coherent conceptual grounds from which to mount any resistance.
Once idealistic about America, at the start of 1989 the young Wang returned to China and, promoted to Dean of Fudan’s International Politics Department, became a leading opponent of liberalization.
He began to argue that China had to resist global liberal influence and become a culturally unified and self-confident nation governed by a strong, centralized party-state. He would develop these ideas into what has become known as China’s “Neo-Authoritarian” movement—though Wang never used the term, identifying himself with China’s “Neo-Conservatives.” This reflected his desire to blend Marxist socialism with traditional Chinese Confucian values and Legalist political thought, maximalist Western ideas of state sovereignty and power, and nationalism in order to synthesize a new basis for long-term stability and growth immune to Western liberalism.
“He was most concerned with the question of how to manage China,” one former Fudan student recalls. “He was suggesting that a strong, centralized state is necessary to hold this society together. He spent every night in his office and didn’t do anything else.”
Wang’s timing couldn’t have been more auspicious. Only months after his return, China’s own emerging contradictions exploded into view in the form of student protests in Tiananmen Square. After PLA tanks crushed the dreams of liberal democracy sprouting in China, CCP leadership began searching desperately for a new political model on which to secure the regime. They soon turned to Wang Huning.
When Wang won national acclaim by leading a university debate team to victory in an international competition in Singapore in 1993, he caught the attention of Jiang Zemin, who had become party leader after Tiananmen. Wang, having defeated National Taiwan University by arguing that human nature is inherently evil, foreshadowed that, “While Western modern civilization can bring material prosperity, it doesn’t necessarily lead to improvement in character.” Jiang plucked him from the university and, at the age of 40, he was granted a leadership position in the CCP’s secretive Central Policy Research Office, putting him on an inside track into the highest echelons of power.
Wang Huning’s Nightmare
From the smug point of view of millions who now inhabit the Chinese internet, Wang’s dark vision of American dissolution was nothing less than prophetic. When they look to the U.S., they no longer see a beacon of liberal democracy standing as an admired symbol of a better future. That was the impression of those who created the famous “Goddess of Democracy,” with her paper-mâché torch held aloft before the Gate of Heavenly Peace.
Instead, they see Wang’s America: deindustrialization, rural decay, over-financialization, out of control asset prices, and the emergence of a self-perpetuating rentier elite; powerful tech monopolies able to crush any upstart competitors operating effectively beyond the scope of government; immense economic inequality, chronic unemployment, addiction, homelessness, and crime; cultural chaos, historical nihilism, family breakdown, and plunging fertility rates; societal despair, spiritual malaise, social isolation, and skyrocketing rates of mental health issues; a loss of national unity and purpose in the face of decadence and barely concealed self-loathing; vast internal divisions, racial tensions, riots, political violence, and a country that increasingly seems close to coming apart.
As a tumultuous 2020 roiled American politics, Chinese people began turning to Wang’s America Against America for answers. And when a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021, the book flew off the shelves. Out-of-print copies began selling for as much as $2,500 on Chinese e-commerce sites.
But Wang is unlikely to be savoring the acclaim, because his worst fear has become reality: the “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis” he identified in America seems to have successfully jumped the Pacific. Despite all his and Xi’s success in draconian suppression of political liberalism, many of the same problems Wang observed in America have nonetheless emerged to ravage China over the last decade as the country progressively embraced a more neoliberal capitalist economic model.
“Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” has rapidly transformed China into one of the most economically unequal societies on earth. It now boasts a Gini Coefficient of, officially, around 0.47, worse than the U.S.’s 0.41. The wealthiest 1% of the population now holds around 31% of the country’s wealth (not far behind the 35% in the U.S.). But most people in China remain relatively poor: some 600 million still subsist on a monthly income of less than 1,000 yuan ($155) a month.
Meanwhile, Chinese tech giants have established monopoly positions even more robust than their U.S. counterparts, often with market shares nearing 90%. Corporate employment frequently features an exhausting “996” (9am to 9pm, 6 days a week) schedule. Others labor among struggling legions trapped by up-front debts in the vast system of modern-day indentured servitude that is the Chinese “gig economy.” Up to 400 million Chinese are forecast to enjoy the liberation of such “self-employment” by 2036, according to Alibaba.
The job market for China’s ever-expanding pool of university graduates is so competitive that “graduation equals unemployment” is a societal meme (the two words share a common Chinese character). And as young people have flocked to urban metropoles to search for employment, rural regions have been drained and left to decay, while centuries of communal extended family life have been upended in a generation, leaving the elderly to rely on the state for marginal care. In the cities, young people have been priced out of the property market by a red-hot asset bubble.
Meanwhile, contrary to trite Western assumptions of an inherently communal Chinese culture, the sense of atomization and low social trust in China has become so acute that it’s led to periodic bouts of anguished societal soul-searching after oddly regular instances in which injured individuals have been left to die on the street by passers-by habitually distrustful of being scammed.
Feeling alone and unable to get ahead in a ruthlessly consumerist society, Chinese youth increasingly describe existing in a state of nihilistic despair encapsulated by the online slang term neijuan (“involution”), which describes a “turning inward” by individuals and society due to a prevalent sense of being stuck in a draining rat race where everyone inevitably loses. This despair has manifested itself in a movement known as tangping, or “lying flat,” in which people attempt to escape that rat race by doing the absolute bare minimum amount of work required to live, becoming modern ascetics.
In this environment, China’s fertility rate has collapsed to 1.3 children per woman as of 2020—below Japan and above only South Korea as the lowest in the world—plunging its economic future into crisis. Ending family size limits and government attempts to persuade families to have more children have been met with incredulity and ridicule by Chinese young people as being “totally out of touch” with economic and social reality. “Do they not yet know that most young people are exhausted just supporting themselves?” asked one typically viral post on social media. It’s true that, given China’s cut-throat education system, raising even one child costs a huge sum: estimates range between $30,000 (about seven times the annual salary of the average citizen) and $115,000, depending on location.
But even those Chinese youth who could afford to have kids have found they enjoy a new lifestyle: the coveted DINK (“Double Income, No Kids”) life, in which well-educated young couples (married or not) spend all that extra cash on themselves. As one thoroughly liberated 27-year-old man with a vasectomy once explained to The New York Times: “For our generation, children aren’t a necessity…Now we can live without any burdens. So why not invest our spiritual and economic resources on our own lives?”
So while Americans have today given up the old dream of liberalizing China, they should maybe look a little closer. It’s true that China never remotely liberalized—if you consider liberalism to be all about democratic elections, a free press, and respect for human rights. But many political thinkers would argue there is more to a comprehensive definition of modern liberalism than that. Instead, they would identify liberalism’s essential telos as being the liberation of the individual from all limiting ties of place, tradition, religion, associations, and relationships, along with all the material limits of nature, in pursuit of the radical autonomy of the modern “consumer.”
From this perspective, China has been thoroughly liberalized, and the picture of what’s happening to Chinese society begins to look far more like Wang’s nightmare of a liberal culture consumed by nihilistic individualism and commodification.
The Grand Experiment
It is in this context that Wang Huning appears to have won a long-running debate within the Chinese system about what’s now required for the People’s Republic of China to endure. The era of tolerance for unfettered economic and cultural liberalism in China is over.
According to a leaked account by one of his old friends, Xi has found himself, like Wang, “repulsed by the all-encompassing commercialization of Chinese society, with its attendant nouveaux riches, official corruption, loss of values, dignity, and self-respect, and such ‘moral evils’ as drugs and prostitution.” Wang has now seemingly convinced Xi that they have no choice but to take drastic action to head off existential threats to social order being generated by Western-style economic and cultural liberal-capitalism—threats nearly identical to those that scourge the U.S.
This intervention has taken the form of the Common Prosperity campaign, with Xi declaring in January that “We absolutely must not allow the gap between rich and poor to get wider,” and warning that “achieving common prosperity is not only an economic issue, but also a major political issue related to the party’s governing foundations.”
This is why anti-monopoly investigations have hit China’s top technology firms with billions of dollars in fines and forced restructurings and strict new data rules have curtailed China’s internet and social media companies. It’s why record-breaking IPOs have been put on hold and corporations ordered to improve labor conditions, with “996” overtime requirements made illegal and pay raised for gig workers. It’s why the government killed off the private tutoring sector overnight and capped property rental price increases. It’s why the government has announced “excessively high incomes” are to be “adjusted.”
And it’s why celebrities like Zhao Wei have been disappearing, why Chinese minors have been banned from playing the “spiritual opium” of video games for more than three hours per week, why LGBT groups have been scrubbed from the internet, and why abortion restrictions have been significantly tightened. As one nationalist article promoted across state media explained, if the liberal West’s “tittytainment strategy” is allowed to succeed in causing China’s “young generation lose their toughness and virility then we will fall…just like the Soviet Union did.” The purpose of Xi’s “profound transformation” is to ensure that “the cultural market will no longer be a paradise for sissy stars, and news and public opinion will no longer be in a position of worshipping Western culture.”
In the end, the campaign represents Wang Huning’s triumph and his terror. It’s thirty years of his thought on culture made manifest in policy.
On one hand, it is worth viewing honestly the level of economic, technological, cultural, and political upheaval the West is currently experiencing and considering whether he may have accurately diagnosed a common undercurrent spreading through our globalized world. On the other, the odds that his gambit to engineer new societal values can succeed seems doubtful, considering the many failures of history’s other would-be “engineers of the soul.”
The best simple proxy to measure this effort in coming years is likely to be demographics. For reasons not entirely clear, many countries around the world now face the same challenge: fertility rates that have fallen below the replacement rate as they’ve developed into advanced economies. This has occurred across a diverse array of political systems, and shows little sign of moderating. Besides immigration, a wide range of policies have now been tried in attempts to raise birth rates, from increased public funding of childcare services to “pro-natal” tax credits for families with children. None have been consistently successful, sparking anguished debate in some quarters on whether losing the will to survive and reproduce is simply a fundamental factor of modernity. But if any country can succeed in reversing this trend, no matter the brute-force effort required, it is likely to be China.
Either way, our world is witnessing a grand experiment that’s now underway: China and the West, facing very similar societal problems, have now, thanks to Wang Huning, embarked on radically different approaches to addressing them. And with China increasingly challenging the United States for a position of global geopolitical and ideological leadership, the conclusion of this experiment could very well shape the global future of governance for the century ahead.
N.S. Lyons is an analyst and writer living and working in Washington, D.C. He is the author of The Upheaval.
News of the Times;
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/bombshell-pfizer-doc-analyzes-numerous-severe-adverse-reactions-following-inoculation/
https://www.wnd.com/2022/03/hidden-camera-n-y-times-reporter-spills-beans-jan-6-riot/
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/archbishop-carlo-vigano-russia-ukraine-war-is-a-globalist-plot-to-establishment-the-tyranny-of-the-new-world-order/
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/victoria-nuland-ukraine-has-biological?s=r
https://www.newsmax.com/politics/russia-ukraine-war-spending/2022/03/09/id/1060331/
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/03/08/leaders-of-saudi-arabia-and-the-united-arab-emirates-refuse-to-take-biden-phone-calls-both-spoke-to-vladimir-putin/
https://www.wnd.com/2022/03/democrats-congress-pressured-oil-industry-cause-pain-americans/
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/ukraine-bans-wheat-grain-exports-vital-global-food-supply-citing-citizens-under-siege
https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/culture/gabriel-hays/2022/03/01/disney-admonishes-russia-what-about-china
https://www.independentsentinel.com/putin-has-an-oil-for-gold-plan-that-spells-danger-for-the-west/
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2022/03/01/seattle-antifa-leftists-target-tv-reporter-for-telling-the-truth-about-drugged-out-homeless-n1562654
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/another-cartel-extermination-site-uncovered-near-us-border
https://vdare.com/articles/26-black-on-white-killings-including-children-10-9-and-5-years-old-and-one-unborn-child-february-2022-another-month-in-the-death-of-white-america
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10590475/CCTV-shows-thug-pull-huge-Rambo-knife-teen-chase-stabbing-death.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PC7DzTRS7A
Told her it's because I can't stand doing it.
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My friends from New York talk about how tough their schools were.
I’m not impressed.
I'm from Texas.
My school had its own coroner.
We used to write essays like: “What I want to be IF I grow up...”
*.*
At the doctor's waiting room a man was sitting opposite a mother and her little daughter.
He asks the little girl, "Hi there, and how old are you?"
The little girl showed him 4 fingers to indicate she is 4 years old.
The man says, "That is nice, but can't you talk?"
The little girl replies, "Yes I can, can't you count?"
*.*
I fell asleep last night reading old magazines.
Woke up this morning with back issues.
*.*
Everyone, please don't ride with me if you're going to scream and grab the dashboard every time I run off the road.
It makes me nervous.
Quote of the Times;
“Reliance on a single foreign supplier can leave a nation vulnerable to extortion and intimidation. That’s why we congratulate European states such as Poland for leading the construction of a Baltic pipeline so that nations are not dependent on Russia to meet their energy needs. Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course. Here in the Western Hemisphere, we are committed to maintaining our independence from the encroachment of expansionist foreign powers.” – President Trump in 2018
Link of the Times;
https://news.gab.com/2022/02/25/gab-go-and-build/
Issue of the Times;
The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning by N.S. Lyons
One day in August 2021, Zhao Wei disappeared. For one of China’s best-known actresses to physically vanish from public view would have been enough to cause a stir on its own. But Zhao’s disappearing act was far more thorough: overnight, she was erased from the internet. Her Weibo social media page, with its 86 million followers, went offline, as did fan sites dedicated to her. Searches for her many films and television shows returned no results on streaming sites. Zhao’s name was scrubbed from the credits of projects she had appeared in or directed, replaced with a blank space. Online discussions uttering her name were censored. Suddenly, little trace remained that the 45-year-old celebrity had ever existed.
She wasn’t alone. Other Chinese entertainers also began to vanish as Chinese government regulators announced a “heightened crackdown” intended to dispense with “vulgar internet celebrities” promoting lascivious lifestyles and to “resolve the problem of chaos” created by online fandom culture. Those imitating the effeminate or androgynous aesthetics of Korean boyband stars—colorfully referred to as “xiao xian rou,” or “little fresh meat”—were next to go, with the government vowing to “resolutely put an end to sissy men” appearing on the screens of China’s impressionable youth.
Zhao and her unfortunate compatriots in the entertainment industry were caught up in something far larger than themselves: a sudden wave of new government policies that are currently upending Chinese life in what state media has characterized as a “profound transformation” of the country. Officially referred to as Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “Common Prosperity” campaign, this transformation is proceeding along two parallel lines: a vast regulatory crackdown roiling the private sector economy and a broader moralistic effort to reengineer Chinese culture from the top down.
But why is this “profound transformation” happening? And why now? Most analysis has focused on one man: Xi and his seemingly endless personal obsession with political control. The overlooked answer, however, is that this is indeed the culmination of decades of thinking and planning by a very powerful man—but that man is not Xi Jinping.
The Grey Eminence
Wang Huning much prefers the shadows to the limelight. An insomniac and workaholic, former friends and colleagues describe the bespectacled, soft-spoken political theorist as introverted and obsessively discreet. It took former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin’s repeated entreaties to convince the brilliant then-young academic—who spoke wistfully of following the traditional path of a Confucian scholar, aloof from politics—to give up academia in the early 1990s and join the Chinese Communist Party regime instead. When he finally did so, Wang cut off nearly all contact with his former connections, stopped publishing and speaking publicly, and implemented a strict policy of never speaking to foreigners at all. Behind this veil of carefully cultivated opacity, it’s unsurprising that so few people in the West know of Wang, let alone know him personally.
Yet Wang Huning is arguably the single most influential “public intellectual” alive today.
A member of the CCP’s seven-man Politburo Standing Committee, he is China’s top ideological theorist, quietly credited as being the “ideas man” behind each of Xi’s signature political concepts, including the “China Dream,” the anti-corruption campaign, the Belt and Road Initiative, a more assertive foreign policy, and even “Xi Jinping Thought.” Scrutinize any photograph of Xi on an important trip or at a key meeting and one is likely to spot Wang there in the background, never far from the leader’s side.
Wang has thus earned comparisons to famous figures of Chinese history like Zhuge Liang and Han Fei (historians dub the latter “China’s Machiavelli”) who similarly served behind the throne as powerful strategic advisers and consiglieres—a position referred to in Chinese literature as dishi: “Emperor’s Teacher.” Such a figure is just as readily recognizable in the West as an éminence grise (“grey eminence”), in the tradition of Tremblay, Talleyrand, Metternich, Kissinger, or Vladimir Putin adviser Vladislav Surkov.
But what is singularly remarkable about Wang is that he’s managed to serve in this role of court philosopher to not just one, but all three of China’s previous top leaders, including as the pen behind Jiang Zemin’s signature “Three Represents” policy and Hu Jintao’s “Harmonious Society.”
In the brutally cutthroat world of CCP factional politics, this is an unprecedented feat. Wang was recruited into the party by Jiang’s “Shanghai Gang,” a rival faction that Xi worked to ruthlessly purge after coming to power in 2012; many prominent members, like former security chief Zhou Yongkang and former vice security minister Sun Lijun, have ended up in prison. Meanwhile, Hu Jintao’s Communist Youth League Faction has also been heavily marginalized as Xi’s faction has consolidated control. Yet Wang Huning remains. More than any other, it is this fact that reveals the depth of his impeccable political cunning.
And the fingerprints of China’s Grey Eminence on the Common Prosperity campaign are unmistakable. While it’s hard to be certain what Wang really believes today inside his black box, he was once an immensely prolific author, publishing nearly 20 books along with numerous essays. And the obvious continuity between the thought in those works and what’s happening in China today says something fascinating about how Beijing has come to perceive the world through the eyes of Wang Huning.
Cultural Competence
While other Chinese teenagers spent the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) “sent down to the countryside” to dig ditches and work on farms, Wang Huning studied French at an elite foreign-language training school near his hometown of Shanghai, spending his days reading banned foreign literary classics secured for him by his teachers. Born in 1955 to a revolutionary family from Shandong, he was a sickly, bookish youth; this, along with his family’s connections, seems to have secured him a pass from hard labor.
When China’s shuttered universities reopened in 1978, following the commencement of “reform and opening” by Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping, Wang was among the first to take the restored national university entrance exam, competing with millions for a chance to return to higher learning. He passed so spectacularly that Shanghai’s Fudan University, one of China’s top institutions, admitted him into its prestigious international politics master’s program despite having never completed a bachelor’s degree.
The thesis work he completed at Fudan, which would become his first book, traced the development of the Western concept of national sovereignty from antiquity to the present day—including from Gilgamesh through Socrates, Aristotle, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Hegel, and Marx—and contrasted it with Chinese conceptions of the idea. The work would become the foundation for many of his future theories of the nation-state and international relations.
But Wang was also beginning to pick up the strands of what would become another core thread of his life’s work: the necessary centrality of culture, tradition, and value structures to political stability.
Wang elaborated on these ideas in a 1988 essay, “The Structure of China’s Changing Political Culture,” which would become one of his most cited works. In it, he argued that the CCP must urgently consider how society’s “software” (culture, values, attitudes) shapes political destiny as much as its “hardware” (economics, systems, institutions). While seemingly a straightforward idea, this was notably a daring break from the materialism of orthodox Marxism.
Examining China in the midst of Deng’s rapid opening to the world, Wang perceived a country “in a state of transformation” from “an economy of production to an economy of consumption,” while evolving “from a spiritually oriented culture to a materially oriented culture,” and “from a collectivist culture to an individualistic culture.”
Meanwhile, he believed that the modernization of “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” was effectively leaving China without any real cultural direction at all. “There are no core values in China’s most recent structure,” he warned. This could serve only to dissolve societal and political cohesion.
That, he said, was untenable. Warning that “the components of the political culture shaped by the Cultural Revolution came to be divorced from the source that gave birth to this culture, as well as from social demands, social values, and social relations”—and thus “the results of the adoption of Marxism were not always positive”—he argued that, “Since 1949, we have criticized the core values of the classical and modern structures, but have not paid enough attention to shaping our own core values.” Therefore: “we must create core values.” Ideally, he concluded, “We must combine the flexibility of [China’s] traditional values with the modern spirit [both Western and Marxist].”
But at this point, like many during those heady years of reform and opening, he remained hopeful that liberalism could play a positive role in China, writing that his recommendations could allow “the components of the modern structure that embody the spirit of modern democracy and humanism [to] find the support they need to take root and grow.”
That would soon change.
A Dark Vision
Also in 1988, Wang—having risen with unprecedented speed to become Fudan’s youngest full professor at age 30—won a coveted scholarship (facilitated by the American Political Science Association) to spend six months in the United States as a visiting scholar. Profoundly curious about America, Wang took full advantage, wandering about the country like a sort of latter-day Chinese Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting more than 30 cities and nearly 20 universities.
What he found deeply disturbed him, permanently shifting his view of the West and the consequences of its ideas.
Wang recorded his observations in a memoir that would become his most famous work: the 1991 book America Against America. In it, he marvels at homeless encampments in the streets of Washington DC, out-of-control drug crime in poor black neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco, and corporations that seemed to have fused themselves to and taken over responsibilities of government. Eventually, he concludes that America faces an “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis” produced by its societal contradictions, including between rich and poor, white and black, democratic and oligarchic power, egalitarianism and class privilege, individual rights and collective responsibilities, cultural traditions and the solvent of liquid modernity.
But while Americans can, he says, perceive that they are faced with “intricate social and cultural problems,” they “tend to think of them as scientific and technological problems” to be solved separately. This gets them nowhere, he argues, because their problems are in fact all inextricably interlinked and have the same root cause: a radical, nihilistic individualism at the heart of modern American liberalism.
“The real cell of society in the United States is the individual,” he finds. This is so because the cell most foundational (per Aristotle) to society, “the family, has disintegrated.” Meanwhile, in the American system, “everything has a dual nature, and the glamour of high commodification abounds. Human flesh, sex, knowledge, politics, power, and law can all become the target of commodification.” This “commodification, in many ways, corrupts society and leads to a number of serious social problems.” In the end, “the American economic system has created human loneliness” as its foremost product, along with spectacular inequality. As a result, “nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock to cultural development and the American spirit.”
Moreover, he says that the “American spirit is facing serious challenges” from new ideational competitors. Reflecting on the universities he visited and quoting approvingly from Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, he notes a growing tension between Enlightenment liberal rationalism and a “younger generation [that] is ignorant of traditional Western values” and actively rejects its cultural inheritance. “If the value system collapses,” he wonders, “how can the social system be sustained?”
Ultimately, he argues, when faced with critical social issues like drug addiction, America’s atomized, deracinated, and dispirited society has found itself with “an insurmountable problem” because it no longer has any coherent conceptual grounds from which to mount any resistance.
Once idealistic about America, at the start of 1989 the young Wang returned to China and, promoted to Dean of Fudan’s International Politics Department, became a leading opponent of liberalization.
He began to argue that China had to resist global liberal influence and become a culturally unified and self-confident nation governed by a strong, centralized party-state. He would develop these ideas into what has become known as China’s “Neo-Authoritarian” movement—though Wang never used the term, identifying himself with China’s “Neo-Conservatives.” This reflected his desire to blend Marxist socialism with traditional Chinese Confucian values and Legalist political thought, maximalist Western ideas of state sovereignty and power, and nationalism in order to synthesize a new basis for long-term stability and growth immune to Western liberalism.
“He was most concerned with the question of how to manage China,” one former Fudan student recalls. “He was suggesting that a strong, centralized state is necessary to hold this society together. He spent every night in his office and didn’t do anything else.”
Wang’s timing couldn’t have been more auspicious. Only months after his return, China’s own emerging contradictions exploded into view in the form of student protests in Tiananmen Square. After PLA tanks crushed the dreams of liberal democracy sprouting in China, CCP leadership began searching desperately for a new political model on which to secure the regime. They soon turned to Wang Huning.
When Wang won national acclaim by leading a university debate team to victory in an international competition in Singapore in 1993, he caught the attention of Jiang Zemin, who had become party leader after Tiananmen. Wang, having defeated National Taiwan University by arguing that human nature is inherently evil, foreshadowed that, “While Western modern civilization can bring material prosperity, it doesn’t necessarily lead to improvement in character.” Jiang plucked him from the university and, at the age of 40, he was granted a leadership position in the CCP’s secretive Central Policy Research Office, putting him on an inside track into the highest echelons of power.
Wang Huning’s Nightmare
From the smug point of view of millions who now inhabit the Chinese internet, Wang’s dark vision of American dissolution was nothing less than prophetic. When they look to the U.S., they no longer see a beacon of liberal democracy standing as an admired symbol of a better future. That was the impression of those who created the famous “Goddess of Democracy,” with her paper-mâché torch held aloft before the Gate of Heavenly Peace.
Instead, they see Wang’s America: deindustrialization, rural decay, over-financialization, out of control asset prices, and the emergence of a self-perpetuating rentier elite; powerful tech monopolies able to crush any upstart competitors operating effectively beyond the scope of government; immense economic inequality, chronic unemployment, addiction, homelessness, and crime; cultural chaos, historical nihilism, family breakdown, and plunging fertility rates; societal despair, spiritual malaise, social isolation, and skyrocketing rates of mental health issues; a loss of national unity and purpose in the face of decadence and barely concealed self-loathing; vast internal divisions, racial tensions, riots, political violence, and a country that increasingly seems close to coming apart.
As a tumultuous 2020 roiled American politics, Chinese people began turning to Wang’s America Against America for answers. And when a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021, the book flew off the shelves. Out-of-print copies began selling for as much as $2,500 on Chinese e-commerce sites.
But Wang is unlikely to be savoring the acclaim, because his worst fear has become reality: the “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis” he identified in America seems to have successfully jumped the Pacific. Despite all his and Xi’s success in draconian suppression of political liberalism, many of the same problems Wang observed in America have nonetheless emerged to ravage China over the last decade as the country progressively embraced a more neoliberal capitalist economic model.
“Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” has rapidly transformed China into one of the most economically unequal societies on earth. It now boasts a Gini Coefficient of, officially, around 0.47, worse than the U.S.’s 0.41. The wealthiest 1% of the population now holds around 31% of the country’s wealth (not far behind the 35% in the U.S.). But most people in China remain relatively poor: some 600 million still subsist on a monthly income of less than 1,000 yuan ($155) a month.
Meanwhile, Chinese tech giants have established monopoly positions even more robust than their U.S. counterparts, often with market shares nearing 90%. Corporate employment frequently features an exhausting “996” (9am to 9pm, 6 days a week) schedule. Others labor among struggling legions trapped by up-front debts in the vast system of modern-day indentured servitude that is the Chinese “gig economy.” Up to 400 million Chinese are forecast to enjoy the liberation of such “self-employment” by 2036, according to Alibaba.
The job market for China’s ever-expanding pool of university graduates is so competitive that “graduation equals unemployment” is a societal meme (the two words share a common Chinese character). And as young people have flocked to urban metropoles to search for employment, rural regions have been drained and left to decay, while centuries of communal extended family life have been upended in a generation, leaving the elderly to rely on the state for marginal care. In the cities, young people have been priced out of the property market by a red-hot asset bubble.
Meanwhile, contrary to trite Western assumptions of an inherently communal Chinese culture, the sense of atomization and low social trust in China has become so acute that it’s led to periodic bouts of anguished societal soul-searching after oddly regular instances in which injured individuals have been left to die on the street by passers-by habitually distrustful of being scammed.
Feeling alone and unable to get ahead in a ruthlessly consumerist society, Chinese youth increasingly describe existing in a state of nihilistic despair encapsulated by the online slang term neijuan (“involution”), which describes a “turning inward” by individuals and society due to a prevalent sense of being stuck in a draining rat race where everyone inevitably loses. This despair has manifested itself in a movement known as tangping, or “lying flat,” in which people attempt to escape that rat race by doing the absolute bare minimum amount of work required to live, becoming modern ascetics.
In this environment, China’s fertility rate has collapsed to 1.3 children per woman as of 2020—below Japan and above only South Korea as the lowest in the world—plunging its economic future into crisis. Ending family size limits and government attempts to persuade families to have more children have been met with incredulity and ridicule by Chinese young people as being “totally out of touch” with economic and social reality. “Do they not yet know that most young people are exhausted just supporting themselves?” asked one typically viral post on social media. It’s true that, given China’s cut-throat education system, raising even one child costs a huge sum: estimates range between $30,000 (about seven times the annual salary of the average citizen) and $115,000, depending on location.
But even those Chinese youth who could afford to have kids have found they enjoy a new lifestyle: the coveted DINK (“Double Income, No Kids”) life, in which well-educated young couples (married or not) spend all that extra cash on themselves. As one thoroughly liberated 27-year-old man with a vasectomy once explained to The New York Times: “For our generation, children aren’t a necessity…Now we can live without any burdens. So why not invest our spiritual and economic resources on our own lives?”
So while Americans have today given up the old dream of liberalizing China, they should maybe look a little closer. It’s true that China never remotely liberalized—if you consider liberalism to be all about democratic elections, a free press, and respect for human rights. But many political thinkers would argue there is more to a comprehensive definition of modern liberalism than that. Instead, they would identify liberalism’s essential telos as being the liberation of the individual from all limiting ties of place, tradition, religion, associations, and relationships, along with all the material limits of nature, in pursuit of the radical autonomy of the modern “consumer.”
From this perspective, China has been thoroughly liberalized, and the picture of what’s happening to Chinese society begins to look far more like Wang’s nightmare of a liberal culture consumed by nihilistic individualism and commodification.
The Grand Experiment
It is in this context that Wang Huning appears to have won a long-running debate within the Chinese system about what’s now required for the People’s Republic of China to endure. The era of tolerance for unfettered economic and cultural liberalism in China is over.
According to a leaked account by one of his old friends, Xi has found himself, like Wang, “repulsed by the all-encompassing commercialization of Chinese society, with its attendant nouveaux riches, official corruption, loss of values, dignity, and self-respect, and such ‘moral evils’ as drugs and prostitution.” Wang has now seemingly convinced Xi that they have no choice but to take drastic action to head off existential threats to social order being generated by Western-style economic and cultural liberal-capitalism—threats nearly identical to those that scourge the U.S.
This intervention has taken the form of the Common Prosperity campaign, with Xi declaring in January that “We absolutely must not allow the gap between rich and poor to get wider,” and warning that “achieving common prosperity is not only an economic issue, but also a major political issue related to the party’s governing foundations.”
This is why anti-monopoly investigations have hit China’s top technology firms with billions of dollars in fines and forced restructurings and strict new data rules have curtailed China’s internet and social media companies. It’s why record-breaking IPOs have been put on hold and corporations ordered to improve labor conditions, with “996” overtime requirements made illegal and pay raised for gig workers. It’s why the government killed off the private tutoring sector overnight and capped property rental price increases. It’s why the government has announced “excessively high incomes” are to be “adjusted.”
And it’s why celebrities like Zhao Wei have been disappearing, why Chinese minors have been banned from playing the “spiritual opium” of video games for more than three hours per week, why LGBT groups have been scrubbed from the internet, and why abortion restrictions have been significantly tightened. As one nationalist article promoted across state media explained, if the liberal West’s “tittytainment strategy” is allowed to succeed in causing China’s “young generation lose their toughness and virility then we will fall…just like the Soviet Union did.” The purpose of Xi’s “profound transformation” is to ensure that “the cultural market will no longer be a paradise for sissy stars, and news and public opinion will no longer be in a position of worshipping Western culture.”
In the end, the campaign represents Wang Huning’s triumph and his terror. It’s thirty years of his thought on culture made manifest in policy.
On one hand, it is worth viewing honestly the level of economic, technological, cultural, and political upheaval the West is currently experiencing and considering whether he may have accurately diagnosed a common undercurrent spreading through our globalized world. On the other, the odds that his gambit to engineer new societal values can succeed seems doubtful, considering the many failures of history’s other would-be “engineers of the soul.”
The best simple proxy to measure this effort in coming years is likely to be demographics. For reasons not entirely clear, many countries around the world now face the same challenge: fertility rates that have fallen below the replacement rate as they’ve developed into advanced economies. This has occurred across a diverse array of political systems, and shows little sign of moderating. Besides immigration, a wide range of policies have now been tried in attempts to raise birth rates, from increased public funding of childcare services to “pro-natal” tax credits for families with children. None have been consistently successful, sparking anguished debate in some quarters on whether losing the will to survive and reproduce is simply a fundamental factor of modernity. But if any country can succeed in reversing this trend, no matter the brute-force effort required, it is likely to be China.
Either way, our world is witnessing a grand experiment that’s now underway: China and the West, facing very similar societal problems, have now, thanks to Wang Huning, embarked on radically different approaches to addressing them. And with China increasingly challenging the United States for a position of global geopolitical and ideological leadership, the conclusion of this experiment could very well shape the global future of governance for the century ahead.
N.S. Lyons is an analyst and writer living and working in Washington, D.C. He is the author of The Upheaval.
News of the Times;
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/bombshell-pfizer-doc-analyzes-numerous-severe-adverse-reactions-following-inoculation/
https://www.wnd.com/2022/03/hidden-camera-n-y-times-reporter-spills-beans-jan-6-riot/
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/archbishop-carlo-vigano-russia-ukraine-war-is-a-globalist-plot-to-establishment-the-tyranny-of-the-new-world-order/
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/victoria-nuland-ukraine-has-biological?s=r
https://www.newsmax.com/politics/russia-ukraine-war-spending/2022/03/09/id/1060331/
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/03/08/leaders-of-saudi-arabia-and-the-united-arab-emirates-refuse-to-take-biden-phone-calls-both-spoke-to-vladimir-putin/
https://www.wnd.com/2022/03/democrats-congress-pressured-oil-industry-cause-pain-americans/
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/ukraine-bans-wheat-grain-exports-vital-global-food-supply-citing-citizens-under-siege
https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/culture/gabriel-hays/2022/03/01/disney-admonishes-russia-what-about-china
https://www.independentsentinel.com/putin-has-an-oil-for-gold-plan-that-spells-danger-for-the-west/
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2022/03/01/seattle-antifa-leftists-target-tv-reporter-for-telling-the-truth-about-drugged-out-homeless-n1562654
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/another-cartel-extermination-site-uncovered-near-us-border
https://vdare.com/articles/26-black-on-white-killings-including-children-10-9-and-5-years-old-and-one-unborn-child-february-2022-another-month-in-the-death-of-white-america
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10590475/CCTV-shows-thug-pull-huge-Rambo-knife-teen-chase-stabbing-death.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PC7DzTRS7A
Union?
Being an adult is apparently about being tired, telling people how tired you are, and listening to other adults say how tired they are.
*.*
You can say, "Have a good day" and people take it well.
Say, "Enjoy the next 24 hours" and you sound threatening?
*.*
Oneliners:
When I'm behind a slow car, I always steer a little to the right so the people behind me can see that it’s not my fault.
Group projects back in school were never meant to teach you teamwork; they were meant to teach you how to handle the incompetence of co-workers in the workplace.
Respect people who wear glasses, they paid money to see you.
You just have to take life one "Are you F***ng kidding me?" at a time.
My mind is like someone emptied the kitchen junk drawer on a trampoline.
Autopsy Club Meets Saturday at 6-Its Open Mike Night.
My advice to buyers when they like the house but their spouse doesn't: new spouses are easier to find in this market than houses.
Old age comes at a bad time; when you finally know everything, you start forgetting everything you know.
Yeah, I think I've hit the age where I now understand why people on game shows were so excited to win an appliance.
It's now officially the season of "I'll pay you back when I get my tax refund."
*.*
An elderly couple in church.
She says, "I just let out a silent fart. What should I do?"
The husband replies, "Get new batteries for your hearing aids."
*.*
I put maple syrup on my wife's shopping list.
Now it’s all sticky.
Quote of the Times;
“Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history, mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power.” - P.J. O’Rourke
Link of the Times;
https://spacenews.com/air-force-secretary-were-worried-about-russia-but-china-is-a-bigger-strategic-threat/
Issue of the Times;
The Real State of the Union by Simon Black
My fellow Americans.
Now that my approval ratings are roughly at the same level as my blood pressure, i.e. barely detectable, and my credibility is nonexistent, I thought I might actually try being honest for a change about the real State of the Union.
Just over a year ago when I took oath of office, I talked about “the common objects we love that define us as Americans. . . Opportunity. Security. Liberty. Dignity. Respect. Honor. And yes, the truth.”
So let me describe to you the State of our Union in those terms:
First, opportunity.
Under my leadership, inflation has reached a 40+ year high and shows no signs of abating.
I’ve also demonstrated how serious I am about fighting inflation by re-appointing the very same Federal Reserve officials who created the inflation to begin with, to another four-year term.
Further, the supply chain crisis we engineered from our cascading failures of labor policy, environmental policy, trade policy, monetary policy, and public health policy, also shows little sign of resolving.
We’ve also been instrumental in destroying the labor market and making it virtually impossible to find workers.
Plus my administration continues to impose new regulations by the day, threaten new taxes, and put out unintelligible public health policies, that make things especially difficult for small and medium-sized businesses.
But at least Pfizer’s profits are at a record high.
Second, security.
Our southern border was overwhelmed with countless migrants almost literally the moment I took office. We continue to ignore this growing crisis.
Similarly, we choose to ignore soaring rates of murder in America’s cities.
As Commander-in-Chief, I ordered the US military to hastily withdraw from Afghanistan without sufficient time to make adequate preparations. As a result, the entire world witnessed one of the most disgraceful, shameful events in US history as we left behind our citizens, our allies, and tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded military equipment to our sworn enemy.
I tried making up for this personal and national humiliation by trying to outmaneuver Vladimir Putin over Ukraine.
My son Hunter and I obviously have a soft spot for Ukraine. But my real priority was using Putin’s military buildup as an opportunity to appear strong again, and hopefully boost my sagging poll numbers.
Despite my years of foreign policy experience, I failed to foresee the consequences of provoking Putin, pushing him into a corner, and essentially daring him to invade.
(And now, by the way, as we are pushing Russia out of the SWIFT international banking platform, I am also failing to foresee the obvious risk of Putin hacking it. But more on that another time…)
You may recall that, while I was hiding in my basement during the 2020 Presidential campaign, I promised voters a “steady hand” when it came to diplomacy and national security.
Well, this is what 5 decades of government experience gets you.
Third, liberty.
We continue to foster a climate where the government tells you what you’re supposed to believe, what you have to put in your body, and how you’re allowed to educate your children.
We think nothing of imposing illegal, unconstitutional mandates, and handing public health bureaucrats the authority to regulate everything from nationwide commerce to the entire US housing market.
Justin Trudeau recently set a fantastic example for us to follow when it comes to individual freedom, and so we’re working hard to become Canada as quickly as possible.
Fourth, dignity and respect.
I promised the American people unity in my inaugural address. I said that “we must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal.”
Naturally I have completely abandoned that promise. Not only have I failed to rein in the intolerant, out-of-control leftist puritans waging cultural genocide across America, but I set a clear example for them by labeling my ideological opponents as White Supremacists.
I call legislation I don’t like “Jim Crow 2.0”. And I encourage federal police agencies to investigate parents who don’t want Critical Race Theory taught to their children in public schools.
Fifth, honor.
My short time in office has brought extreme dishonor upon the reputation of the United States. In addition to the humiliation in Afghanistan, the rest of the world must be in shock as they see the constant chaos and absurdity of our government.
We are more consumed by pronouns than progress. We publicly embrace Marxist ideologies. We push our intelligence agencies to prioritize diversity and inclusion over national security. We deliberately undercut our ally—the French—to do a submarine deal with Australia that provided absolutely zero benefit to our nation.
And just recently our public debt reached a whopping $30 trillion… which hardly brings any honor or esteem to our nation.
Last but not least, truth.
I told Americans last year during my inauguration that “each of us has a duty and responsibility, as citizens, as Americans. . . to defend the truth and to defeat the lies.”
That’s why my administration has worked diligently to suppress free speech. We believe that #science has only one authority figure, and anyone who disagrees with his eminence, Lord Protector Fauci, is guilty of misinformation.
For that reason we enlisted the support of Big Tech to remove posts and terminate user accounts upon our request.
We claim that we love democracy so much, yet we continue to assert federal control over state and local elections. One of our goals is to squash any state law requiring voters to present valid identification before being allowed to cast their ballots.
Requiring identification would help reduce voter fraud and increase election security. But we like voter fraud… so we’re opposed to any identification requirement and label them as racist.
We also rely on the mainstream media, which absurdly claims to be objective and unbiased, to reinforce our ridiculous propaganda. They do so willingly and voluntarily, refraining from holding me accountable or asking any difficult questions whatsoever.
This, my fellow Americans, is the real State of our Union.
And if you feel a bit down about the State of our Union, just remember-- I’ll still be President for another 3 years, 10 months, 19 days. We have a looooong way to go.
News of the Times;
https://www.based-politics.com/2022/03/04/bls-february-jobs-report-shows-real-wages-declining/
https://nalert.blogspot.com/2022/03/former-illinois-speaker-chairman-of.html
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-wests-green-delusions-empowered?s=r
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2022/03/02/d-c-schools-screw-the-cdc-the-masks-stay-on-in-schools-n452361
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/official-cheated-emerald-robinson-reports-2020-election-wisconsin-green-bay-run-new-york-attorney-hyatt-hotel/
https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2022/03/03/guilty-plea-entered-in-yuma-ballot-harvesting-case-exposed-by-local-residents/
https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/luciano-cunha-cancel-culture/
https://www.wnd.com/2022/03/widespread-election-fraud-revealed-report/
https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2022/03/02/social-media-tic-disorders/5471646165893/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/bronx-man-arrested-smearing-human-feces-womans-face-20-arrests-since-1999/
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/ukraine-based-hardcore-child-pornography-website-founder-pleads-guilty
https://djhjmedia.com/rich/pelosi-tells-reporters-gop-members-of-the-house-should-shut-up-about-13-military-personnel-killed-in-afghanistan-thanks-to-joe-biden/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/watch-live-peoples-convoy-truck-protest-imminently-encircle-washington-dc-beltway
https://reason.com/2022/03/01/why-cant-we-build-anything/
https://www.bitchute.com/video/INcfOncVVdfe/
*.*
You can say, "Have a good day" and people take it well.
Say, "Enjoy the next 24 hours" and you sound threatening?
*.*
Oneliners:
When I'm behind a slow car, I always steer a little to the right so the people behind me can see that it’s not my fault.
Group projects back in school were never meant to teach you teamwork; they were meant to teach you how to handle the incompetence of co-workers in the workplace.
Respect people who wear glasses, they paid money to see you.
You just have to take life one "Are you F***ng kidding me?" at a time.
My mind is like someone emptied the kitchen junk drawer on a trampoline.
Autopsy Club Meets Saturday at 6-Its Open Mike Night.
My advice to buyers when they like the house but their spouse doesn't: new spouses are easier to find in this market than houses.
Old age comes at a bad time; when you finally know everything, you start forgetting everything you know.
Yeah, I think I've hit the age where I now understand why people on game shows were so excited to win an appliance.
It's now officially the season of "I'll pay you back when I get my tax refund."
*.*
An elderly couple in church.
She says, "I just let out a silent fart. What should I do?"
The husband replies, "Get new batteries for your hearing aids."
*.*
I put maple syrup on my wife's shopping list.
Now it’s all sticky.
Quote of the Times;
“Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history, mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power.” - P.J. O’Rourke
Link of the Times;
https://spacenews.com/air-force-secretary-were-worried-about-russia-but-china-is-a-bigger-strategic-threat/
Issue of the Times;
The Real State of the Union by Simon Black
My fellow Americans.
Now that my approval ratings are roughly at the same level as my blood pressure, i.e. barely detectable, and my credibility is nonexistent, I thought I might actually try being honest for a change about the real State of the Union.
Just over a year ago when I took oath of office, I talked about “the common objects we love that define us as Americans. . . Opportunity. Security. Liberty. Dignity. Respect. Honor. And yes, the truth.”
So let me describe to you the State of our Union in those terms:
First, opportunity.
Under my leadership, inflation has reached a 40+ year high and shows no signs of abating.
I’ve also demonstrated how serious I am about fighting inflation by re-appointing the very same Federal Reserve officials who created the inflation to begin with, to another four-year term.
Further, the supply chain crisis we engineered from our cascading failures of labor policy, environmental policy, trade policy, monetary policy, and public health policy, also shows little sign of resolving.
We’ve also been instrumental in destroying the labor market and making it virtually impossible to find workers.
Plus my administration continues to impose new regulations by the day, threaten new taxes, and put out unintelligible public health policies, that make things especially difficult for small and medium-sized businesses.
But at least Pfizer’s profits are at a record high.
Second, security.
Our southern border was overwhelmed with countless migrants almost literally the moment I took office. We continue to ignore this growing crisis.
Similarly, we choose to ignore soaring rates of murder in America’s cities.
As Commander-in-Chief, I ordered the US military to hastily withdraw from Afghanistan without sufficient time to make adequate preparations. As a result, the entire world witnessed one of the most disgraceful, shameful events in US history as we left behind our citizens, our allies, and tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded military equipment to our sworn enemy.
I tried making up for this personal and national humiliation by trying to outmaneuver Vladimir Putin over Ukraine.
My son Hunter and I obviously have a soft spot for Ukraine. But my real priority was using Putin’s military buildup as an opportunity to appear strong again, and hopefully boost my sagging poll numbers.
Despite my years of foreign policy experience, I failed to foresee the consequences of provoking Putin, pushing him into a corner, and essentially daring him to invade.
(And now, by the way, as we are pushing Russia out of the SWIFT international banking platform, I am also failing to foresee the obvious risk of Putin hacking it. But more on that another time…)
You may recall that, while I was hiding in my basement during the 2020 Presidential campaign, I promised voters a “steady hand” when it came to diplomacy and national security.
Well, this is what 5 decades of government experience gets you.
Third, liberty.
We continue to foster a climate where the government tells you what you’re supposed to believe, what you have to put in your body, and how you’re allowed to educate your children.
We think nothing of imposing illegal, unconstitutional mandates, and handing public health bureaucrats the authority to regulate everything from nationwide commerce to the entire US housing market.
Justin Trudeau recently set a fantastic example for us to follow when it comes to individual freedom, and so we’re working hard to become Canada as quickly as possible.
Fourth, dignity and respect.
I promised the American people unity in my inaugural address. I said that “we must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal.”
Naturally I have completely abandoned that promise. Not only have I failed to rein in the intolerant, out-of-control leftist puritans waging cultural genocide across America, but I set a clear example for them by labeling my ideological opponents as White Supremacists.
I call legislation I don’t like “Jim Crow 2.0”. And I encourage federal police agencies to investigate parents who don’t want Critical Race Theory taught to their children in public schools.
Fifth, honor.
My short time in office has brought extreme dishonor upon the reputation of the United States. In addition to the humiliation in Afghanistan, the rest of the world must be in shock as they see the constant chaos and absurdity of our government.
We are more consumed by pronouns than progress. We publicly embrace Marxist ideologies. We push our intelligence agencies to prioritize diversity and inclusion over national security. We deliberately undercut our ally—the French—to do a submarine deal with Australia that provided absolutely zero benefit to our nation.
And just recently our public debt reached a whopping $30 trillion… which hardly brings any honor or esteem to our nation.
Last but not least, truth.
I told Americans last year during my inauguration that “each of us has a duty and responsibility, as citizens, as Americans. . . to defend the truth and to defeat the lies.”
That’s why my administration has worked diligently to suppress free speech. We believe that #science has only one authority figure, and anyone who disagrees with his eminence, Lord Protector Fauci, is guilty of misinformation.
For that reason we enlisted the support of Big Tech to remove posts and terminate user accounts upon our request.
We claim that we love democracy so much, yet we continue to assert federal control over state and local elections. One of our goals is to squash any state law requiring voters to present valid identification before being allowed to cast their ballots.
Requiring identification would help reduce voter fraud and increase election security. But we like voter fraud… so we’re opposed to any identification requirement and label them as racist.
We also rely on the mainstream media, which absurdly claims to be objective and unbiased, to reinforce our ridiculous propaganda. They do so willingly and voluntarily, refraining from holding me accountable or asking any difficult questions whatsoever.
This, my fellow Americans, is the real State of our Union.
And if you feel a bit down about the State of our Union, just remember-- I’ll still be President for another 3 years, 10 months, 19 days. We have a looooong way to go.
News of the Times;
https://www.based-politics.com/2022/03/04/bls-february-jobs-report-shows-real-wages-declining/
https://nalert.blogspot.com/2022/03/former-illinois-speaker-chairman-of.html
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-wests-green-delusions-empowered?s=r
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2022/03/02/d-c-schools-screw-the-cdc-the-masks-stay-on-in-schools-n452361
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/official-cheated-emerald-robinson-reports-2020-election-wisconsin-green-bay-run-new-york-attorney-hyatt-hotel/
https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2022/03/03/guilty-plea-entered-in-yuma-ballot-harvesting-case-exposed-by-local-residents/
https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/luciano-cunha-cancel-culture/
https://www.wnd.com/2022/03/widespread-election-fraud-revealed-report/
https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2022/03/02/social-media-tic-disorders/5471646165893/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/bronx-man-arrested-smearing-human-feces-womans-face-20-arrests-since-1999/
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/ukraine-based-hardcore-child-pornography-website-founder-pleads-guilty
https://djhjmedia.com/rich/pelosi-tells-reporters-gop-members-of-the-house-should-shut-up-about-13-military-personnel-killed-in-afghanistan-thanks-to-joe-biden/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/watch-live-peoples-convoy-truck-protest-imminently-encircle-washington-dc-beltway
https://reason.com/2022/03/01/why-cant-we-build-anything/
https://www.bitchute.com/video/INcfOncVVdfe/
Wars?
Children are like pancakes.
The first one always comes out a little weird.
*.*
I used to be a math teacher.
I quit though.
Had too many problems.
*.*
Oneliners:
Time to get up and get going, today's bad decisions aren't going to make themselves.
A foot of new snow, yes, but at least you can't see the dog poop anymore!
Bon Jovi must be ¾ of the way there by now.
There are times I wish I had a clone, but then I realize I could never live with that jerk.
Why the heck do underwear and socks come in resealable bags, but potato chips don't?
I just cannot believe I have to be an adult the rest of my life.
My family told me to get help with my drinking, so I hired a bartender.
I'm tired of winter. I want to fast-forward to complaining about how hot it is.
My high school was so small, we had drivers education and sex education in the same car.
I haven't sold a single copy of my autobiography, that's the story of my life.
*.*
I went by the house I grew up in and asked if I could go in and look around.
They said no and slammed the door in my face!
Parents can be real jerks.
*.*
Why did the banana go to the doctor?
He wasn't peeling well.
Quote of the Times;
“The data Pfizer was forced to release showed a 3% mortality rate for the vaccines, which is 12 times the COVID death rate.” - Attorney Thomas Renz
Link of the Times;
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/02/26/the-first-casualty-of-war-is-the-truth-the-current-western-propaganda-for-ukraine-is-epic-in-scale/
Issue of the Times;
The US and NATO have never been sanctioned for starting wars. Why? by Robert Bridge
The reaction to Russia’s attack on Ukraine, no matter what you think about it, has exposed the West’s double standards
The West has taken an extreme stance against Russia over its invasion in Ukraine. This reaction exposes a high degree of hypocrisy considering that US-led wars abroad never received the punitive response they deserved.
If the current events in Ukraine have proven anything, it’s that the United States and its transatlantic partners are able to run roughshod across a shell-shocked planet – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, to name a few of the hotspots – with almost total impunity. Meanwhile, Russia and Vladimir Putin are being portrayed in nearly every mainstream media publication today as the second coming of Nazi Germany for their actions in Ukraine.
First, let’s be clear about something. Hypocrisy and double standards alone do not provide justification for the opening of hostilities by any country. In other words, just because NATO-bloc countries have been tearing a path of wanton destruction around the globe since 2001 without serious consequences, this does not give Russia, or any country, moral license to behave in a similar manner. There must be a convincing reason for a country to authorize the use of force, thereby committing itself to what could be considered ‘a just war’. Thus, the question: Can Russia’s actions today be considered ‘just’ or, at the very least, understandable? I will leave that answer up to the reader’s better judgment, but it would be idle not to consider some important details.
Only to the consumers of mainstream media fast food would it come as a surprise that Moscow has been warning on NATO expansion for well over a decade. In his now-famous speech to the Munich Security Conference in 2007, Vladimir Putin poignantly asked the assembled global powerbrokers point blank, “why is it necessary to put military infrastructure on our borders during this [NATO] expansion? Can someone answer this question?” Later in the speech, he said that expanding military assets smack up to the Russian border “is not connected in any way with the democratic choices of individual states.”
Not only were the Russian leader’s concerns met with the predictable amount of disregard amid the deafening sound of crickets, NATO has gone on to bestow membership on four more countries since that day (Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia). As a thought experiment that even a dolt could conduct, imagine Washington’s reaction if Moscow were building a continuously expanding military bloc in South America, for example.
The real cause for Moscow’s alarm, however, came when the US and NATO began flooding neighboring Ukraine with a dazzling array of sophisticated weaponry amid calls for membership in the military bloc. What on earth could go wrong? In Moscow’s mind, Ukraine was beginning to pose an existential threat to Russia.
In December, Moscow, quickly nearing the end of its patience, delivered draft treaties to the US and NATO, demanding they halt any further military expansion eastwards, including by the accession of Ukraine or any other states. It included the explicit statement that NATO “shall not conduct any military activity on the territory of Ukraine or other states of Eastern Europe, South Caucasus and Central Asia.” Once again, Russia’s proposals were met with arrogance and indifference by Western leaders.
While people will have varying opinions as to the shocking actions that Moscow took next, nobody can say they were not warned. After all, it’s not like Russia woke up on February 24 and suddenly decided it was a wonderful day to start a military operation on the territory of Ukraine. So yes, an argument could be made that Russia had concern for its own security as a justification for its actions. Unfortunately, the same thing may be more difficult to say for the United States and its NATO minions with regards to their belligerent behavior over the course of the last two decades.
Consider the most notorious example, the 2003 invasion of Iraq. This disastrous war, which the Western media hacks have chalked up as an unfortunate ‘intelligence failure’, represents one of the most egregious acts of unprovoked aggression in recent memory. Without delving too deep into the murky details, the United States, having just suffered the attacks of 9/11, accused Saddam Hussein of Iraq of harboring weapons of mass destruction. Yet, instead of working in close cooperation with the UN weapons inspectors, who were on the ground in Iraq attempting to verify the claims, the US, together with the UK, Australia, and Poland, launched a ‘shock-and-awe’ bombing campaign against Iraq on March 19, 2003. In a flash, over a million innocent Iraqis suffered death, injury, or displacement by this flagrant violation of international law.
The Center for Public Integrity reported that the Bush administration, in its effort to bolster public support for the impending carnage, made over 900 false statements between 2001 and 2003 about Iraq’s alleged threat to the US and its allies. Yet somehow the Western media, which has become the most rabid proliferator for military aggression bar none, failed to find any flaw in the argument for war – that is, until after the boots and blood were on the ground, of course.
It might be expected, in a more perfect world, that the US and its allies were subjected to some stiff sanctions in the wake of this protracted eight-year ‘mistake’ against innocents. In fact, there were sanctions, just not against the United States. Ironically, the only sanctions that resulted from this crazy military adventure were against France, a NATO member that had declined the invitation, together with Germany, to participate in the Iraqi bloodbath. The global hyper-power is not used to such rejection, especially from its purported friends.
American politicians, self-assured in their Godlike exceptionalism, demanded a boycott of French wine and bottled water due to the French government’s “ungrateful” opposition to war in Iraq. Other agitators for war betrayed their lack of seriousness by insisting that the popular menu item known as ‘French Fries’ be substituted with the name ‘Freedom Fries’ instead. So the lack of French Bordeaux, together with the tedious redrafting of restaurant menus, seems to have been the only real inconveniences the US and NATO suffered for indiscriminately destroying millions of lives.
Now compare this kid gloves approach to the US and its allies to the current situation involving Ukraine, where the scales of justice are clearly weighed down against Russia, and despite its not unreasonable warnings that it was feeling threatened by NATO advances. Whatever a person may think about the conflict now raging between Russia and Ukraine, it cannot be denied that the hypocrisy and double standards being leveled against Russia by its perennial detractors is as shocking as it is predictable. The difference today, however, is that bombs are going off.
Aside from the severe sanctioning of Russian individuals and the Russian economy, perhaps best summed up by the French economy minister, who said his country is committed to waging “a total economic and financial war on Russia,” there has been a deeply disturbing effort to silence news and information coming from those Russian sources that might give the Western public the option of seeing Moscow's motivations. On Tuesday, March 1, YouTube decided to block the channels of RT and Sputnik for all European users, thereby allowing the Western world to seize another chunk of the global narrative.
Considering the way that Russia has been vilified in the ‘empire of lies’, as Vladimir Putin dubbed the land of his politically motivated persecutors, some may believe that Russia deserves the non-stop threats it is now receiving. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. This sort of global grandstanding, which resembles some sort of mindless virtue-signaling campaign now so popular in liberal capitals, aside from unnecessarily inflaming an already volatile situation, assumes that Russia is totally wrong, period.
Such a reckless approach, which leaves no room for debate, no room for discussion, no room for seeing Russia’s side in this extremely complex situation, only guarantees further standoffs, if not full-blown global war, further down the road. Unless the West is actively seeking the outbreak of World War III, it would be advisable to stop the hideous hypocrisy and double standards against Russia and patiently listen to its opinions and version of events (even ones presented by foreign media). It’s not as unbelievable as some people may wish to believe.
Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of 'Midnight in the American Empire,' How Corporations and Their Political Servants are Destroying the American Dream.
News of the Times;
https://buchanan.org/blog/did-we-provoke-putins-war-in-ukraine-159120
https://ussanews.com/permanent-capitol-fence-will-make-america-look-like-authoritarian-state/
https://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/covid-rules-failed-facui-blames-those-who-refused-to-obey-him
https://www.wnd.com/2022/03/evidence-shows-bidens-claim-covid-vaccines-protect-people-flat-wrong/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/02/another-j6-protester-dead-makes-5-trump-supporters-dead-non-violent-defendant-commits-suicide-sentencing/
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/historic-breach-neutrality-switzerland-joins-eu-sanctions-russia
https://justthenews.com/nation/states/center-square/california-officials-denounce-texas-directive-against-trans-children
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/landonmion/2021/10/23/putin-slams-us-for-deleting-its-history-calls-transgenderism-a-crime-against-humanity-n2597918
https://www.wnd.com/2022/03/hungarian-pm-warns-tyranny-greater-pandemic-coming/
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/why_are_caucasians_vanisihing_in_tv_commercials_.html
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/02/bidens-scotus-pick-history-decisions-overturned-judicial-overreach-law-professor-points/
https://christiansfortruth.com/black-school-teacher-fired-for-tweeting-that-hitler-kicked-demonic-rothschild-bankers-out-of-germany/
https://newspunch.com/putin-orders-military-to-destroy-bio-labs-in-ukraine-as-us-scrubs-evidence-of-their-existence/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/huge-following-wisconsin-justice-gablemans-explosive-testimony-democrat-election-fraud-amistad-project-ties-zuckerbucks-nursing-home-voter-fraud/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5sUCRTvMeE
The first one always comes out a little weird.
*.*
I used to be a math teacher.
I quit though.
Had too many problems.
*.*
Oneliners:
Time to get up and get going, today's bad decisions aren't going to make themselves.
A foot of new snow, yes, but at least you can't see the dog poop anymore!
Bon Jovi must be ¾ of the way there by now.
There are times I wish I had a clone, but then I realize I could never live with that jerk.
Why the heck do underwear and socks come in resealable bags, but potato chips don't?
I just cannot believe I have to be an adult the rest of my life.
My family told me to get help with my drinking, so I hired a bartender.
I'm tired of winter. I want to fast-forward to complaining about how hot it is.
My high school was so small, we had drivers education and sex education in the same car.
I haven't sold a single copy of my autobiography, that's the story of my life.
*.*
I went by the house I grew up in and asked if I could go in and look around.
They said no and slammed the door in my face!
Parents can be real jerks.
*.*
Why did the banana go to the doctor?
He wasn't peeling well.
Quote of the Times;
“The data Pfizer was forced to release showed a 3% mortality rate for the vaccines, which is 12 times the COVID death rate.” - Attorney Thomas Renz
Link of the Times;
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/02/26/the-first-casualty-of-war-is-the-truth-the-current-western-propaganda-for-ukraine-is-epic-in-scale/
Issue of the Times;
The US and NATO have never been sanctioned for starting wars. Why? by Robert Bridge
The reaction to Russia’s attack on Ukraine, no matter what you think about it, has exposed the West’s double standards
The West has taken an extreme stance against Russia over its invasion in Ukraine. This reaction exposes a high degree of hypocrisy considering that US-led wars abroad never received the punitive response they deserved.
If the current events in Ukraine have proven anything, it’s that the United States and its transatlantic partners are able to run roughshod across a shell-shocked planet – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, to name a few of the hotspots – with almost total impunity. Meanwhile, Russia and Vladimir Putin are being portrayed in nearly every mainstream media publication today as the second coming of Nazi Germany for their actions in Ukraine.
First, let’s be clear about something. Hypocrisy and double standards alone do not provide justification for the opening of hostilities by any country. In other words, just because NATO-bloc countries have been tearing a path of wanton destruction around the globe since 2001 without serious consequences, this does not give Russia, or any country, moral license to behave in a similar manner. There must be a convincing reason for a country to authorize the use of force, thereby committing itself to what could be considered ‘a just war’. Thus, the question: Can Russia’s actions today be considered ‘just’ or, at the very least, understandable? I will leave that answer up to the reader’s better judgment, but it would be idle not to consider some important details.
Only to the consumers of mainstream media fast food would it come as a surprise that Moscow has been warning on NATO expansion for well over a decade. In his now-famous speech to the Munich Security Conference in 2007, Vladimir Putin poignantly asked the assembled global powerbrokers point blank, “why is it necessary to put military infrastructure on our borders during this [NATO] expansion? Can someone answer this question?” Later in the speech, he said that expanding military assets smack up to the Russian border “is not connected in any way with the democratic choices of individual states.”
Not only were the Russian leader’s concerns met with the predictable amount of disregard amid the deafening sound of crickets, NATO has gone on to bestow membership on four more countries since that day (Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia). As a thought experiment that even a dolt could conduct, imagine Washington’s reaction if Moscow were building a continuously expanding military bloc in South America, for example.
The real cause for Moscow’s alarm, however, came when the US and NATO began flooding neighboring Ukraine with a dazzling array of sophisticated weaponry amid calls for membership in the military bloc. What on earth could go wrong? In Moscow’s mind, Ukraine was beginning to pose an existential threat to Russia.
In December, Moscow, quickly nearing the end of its patience, delivered draft treaties to the US and NATO, demanding they halt any further military expansion eastwards, including by the accession of Ukraine or any other states. It included the explicit statement that NATO “shall not conduct any military activity on the territory of Ukraine or other states of Eastern Europe, South Caucasus and Central Asia.” Once again, Russia’s proposals were met with arrogance and indifference by Western leaders.
While people will have varying opinions as to the shocking actions that Moscow took next, nobody can say they were not warned. After all, it’s not like Russia woke up on February 24 and suddenly decided it was a wonderful day to start a military operation on the territory of Ukraine. So yes, an argument could be made that Russia had concern for its own security as a justification for its actions. Unfortunately, the same thing may be more difficult to say for the United States and its NATO minions with regards to their belligerent behavior over the course of the last two decades.
Consider the most notorious example, the 2003 invasion of Iraq. This disastrous war, which the Western media hacks have chalked up as an unfortunate ‘intelligence failure’, represents one of the most egregious acts of unprovoked aggression in recent memory. Without delving too deep into the murky details, the United States, having just suffered the attacks of 9/11, accused Saddam Hussein of Iraq of harboring weapons of mass destruction. Yet, instead of working in close cooperation with the UN weapons inspectors, who were on the ground in Iraq attempting to verify the claims, the US, together with the UK, Australia, and Poland, launched a ‘shock-and-awe’ bombing campaign against Iraq on March 19, 2003. In a flash, over a million innocent Iraqis suffered death, injury, or displacement by this flagrant violation of international law.
The Center for Public Integrity reported that the Bush administration, in its effort to bolster public support for the impending carnage, made over 900 false statements between 2001 and 2003 about Iraq’s alleged threat to the US and its allies. Yet somehow the Western media, which has become the most rabid proliferator for military aggression bar none, failed to find any flaw in the argument for war – that is, until after the boots and blood were on the ground, of course.
It might be expected, in a more perfect world, that the US and its allies were subjected to some stiff sanctions in the wake of this protracted eight-year ‘mistake’ against innocents. In fact, there were sanctions, just not against the United States. Ironically, the only sanctions that resulted from this crazy military adventure were against France, a NATO member that had declined the invitation, together with Germany, to participate in the Iraqi bloodbath. The global hyper-power is not used to such rejection, especially from its purported friends.
American politicians, self-assured in their Godlike exceptionalism, demanded a boycott of French wine and bottled water due to the French government’s “ungrateful” opposition to war in Iraq. Other agitators for war betrayed their lack of seriousness by insisting that the popular menu item known as ‘French Fries’ be substituted with the name ‘Freedom Fries’ instead. So the lack of French Bordeaux, together with the tedious redrafting of restaurant menus, seems to have been the only real inconveniences the US and NATO suffered for indiscriminately destroying millions of lives.
Now compare this kid gloves approach to the US and its allies to the current situation involving Ukraine, where the scales of justice are clearly weighed down against Russia, and despite its not unreasonable warnings that it was feeling threatened by NATO advances. Whatever a person may think about the conflict now raging between Russia and Ukraine, it cannot be denied that the hypocrisy and double standards being leveled against Russia by its perennial detractors is as shocking as it is predictable. The difference today, however, is that bombs are going off.
Aside from the severe sanctioning of Russian individuals and the Russian economy, perhaps best summed up by the French economy minister, who said his country is committed to waging “a total economic and financial war on Russia,” there has been a deeply disturbing effort to silence news and information coming from those Russian sources that might give the Western public the option of seeing Moscow's motivations. On Tuesday, March 1, YouTube decided to block the channels of RT and Sputnik for all European users, thereby allowing the Western world to seize another chunk of the global narrative.
Considering the way that Russia has been vilified in the ‘empire of lies’, as Vladimir Putin dubbed the land of his politically motivated persecutors, some may believe that Russia deserves the non-stop threats it is now receiving. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. This sort of global grandstanding, which resembles some sort of mindless virtue-signaling campaign now so popular in liberal capitals, aside from unnecessarily inflaming an already volatile situation, assumes that Russia is totally wrong, period.
Such a reckless approach, which leaves no room for debate, no room for discussion, no room for seeing Russia’s side in this extremely complex situation, only guarantees further standoffs, if not full-blown global war, further down the road. Unless the West is actively seeking the outbreak of World War III, it would be advisable to stop the hideous hypocrisy and double standards against Russia and patiently listen to its opinions and version of events (even ones presented by foreign media). It’s not as unbelievable as some people may wish to believe.
Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of 'Midnight in the American Empire,' How Corporations and Their Political Servants are Destroying the American Dream.
News of the Times;
https://buchanan.org/blog/did-we-provoke-putins-war-in-ukraine-159120
https://ussanews.com/permanent-capitol-fence-will-make-america-look-like-authoritarian-state/
https://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/covid-rules-failed-facui-blames-those-who-refused-to-obey-him
https://www.wnd.com/2022/03/evidence-shows-bidens-claim-covid-vaccines-protect-people-flat-wrong/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/02/another-j6-protester-dead-makes-5-trump-supporters-dead-non-violent-defendant-commits-suicide-sentencing/
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/historic-breach-neutrality-switzerland-joins-eu-sanctions-russia
https://justthenews.com/nation/states/center-square/california-officials-denounce-texas-directive-against-trans-children
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/landonmion/2021/10/23/putin-slams-us-for-deleting-its-history-calls-transgenderism-a-crime-against-humanity-n2597918
https://www.wnd.com/2022/03/hungarian-pm-warns-tyranny-greater-pandemic-coming/
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/why_are_caucasians_vanisihing_in_tv_commercials_.html
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/02/bidens-scotus-pick-history-decisions-overturned-judicial-overreach-law-professor-points/
https://christiansfortruth.com/black-school-teacher-fired-for-tweeting-that-hitler-kicked-demonic-rothschild-bankers-out-of-germany/
https://newspunch.com/putin-orders-military-to-destroy-bio-labs-in-ukraine-as-us-scrubs-evidence-of-their-existence/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/huge-following-wisconsin-justice-gablemans-explosive-testimony-democrat-election-fraud-amistad-project-ties-zuckerbucks-nursing-home-voter-fraud/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5sUCRTvMeE
Several animals were savagely beaten in the making of this page, including but not limited to; kittens, rabbits, zebu, skunks, puppies, and platypus. Also several monkeys where force fed crack to improve their typing skills.
And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.
And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.