“Good Guys” And “Bad Guys” Are A Hollywood Illusion – Caitlin Johnstone (This is one of the best I have read on the subject - just excellent! - CL)

If you have spent literally any time arguing against western imperialism in any public forum, you have had the experience of being accused of “supporting” one of said imperialism’s targets. If you argue against regime change interventionism in Syria, you’ll get accused of being an “Assadist” or “Assad apologist”. If you argue against regime change interventionism in Iran, you’ll you’ll get people saying that you “support the Mullahs”. Enter into any debate of sufficient liveliness and it’s only a matter of minutes before it happens.

There was a meme going around at the height of the most recent failed coup attempt in Venezuela depicting a white, pink-haired socialist placing their hand over the mouth of a dark-skinned Venezuelan and saying “ACKSHUALLY, MADURO IS THE GOOD GUY”. Proponents of the Trump administration’s attempts to topple the Venezuelan government would share this meme in online debates with anti-imperialists as a way of accusing them of whitesplaining to Venezuelans that they should support an evil dictator who is oppressing them. The idea being, of course, to silence those dastardly socialists using the socially progressive value system they claim to uphold. Checkmate, leftists.

There are obviously a number of things that are wrong with this meme, including the skin pigmentation of the average Guaido supporter, the implication that all Venezuelans oppose Maduro, and the suggestion that only white western leftists oppose the Trump administration’s attempts to install a puppet regime in the nation with the largest proven oil reserves on the planet. But the dumbest thing about it is the implication that someone who opposes US regime change interventionism could only be doing so because they believe that Nicolás Maduro is a “good guy”.

The reason debates about western imperialism so frequently get bogged down by moronic arguments about “good guys” and “bad guys” is because human storytelling devices train us from an early age to constantly frame narratives in those terms. Everything we’ve been taught by TV and movies tells us that if a conflict is happening, someone in it must be the protagonist and someone must be the antagonist, and that our job is to figure out which one’s which.

For as long as humans have been telling stories, this is how they’ve been doing it. A hero wants something, has some kind of adventure trying to get it, but a villain tries to stop them. It’s a recipe for exciting storytelling that’s been used since time immemorial, and it works because the standard human ego is structured to spin mental narratives about itself as the central character whose wants are constantly being fulfilled by friendlies and thwarted by hostiles. Almost every story from the earliest prehistoric campfire circles to the latest Hollywood blockbuster has in essence been nothing other than a storyteller using a simple mind hack to attract the interest and attention of their audience, just by making their narrative relatable using the protagonist/antagonist framework which the ego finds so appealing.

We’re always the hero in our little ego narratives about our day-to-day lives. We like people who do things we want and we dislike people who do things we don’t want. We stand transfixed by our babbling mental ego narratives, so we find any similar external narrative mesmerising in the same way.

But it’s just an illusion. There are no “good guys” or “bad guys” in real life, either in our personal lives or in international affairs. There are just people. Some of those people do things we like more often than they do things we don’t like, and vice versa, but that’s not a matter of whether they’re “good” or “bad”, it’s a matter of our personal preferences and how we think people ought to behave. “Good” or “bad” isn’t written on anyone’s DNA or inscribed above their heads upon the fabric of reality; we made it up.

In reality, it’s very possible to oppose US regime change interventionism in Venezuela without having a single thought ever appear in your head about whether or not Nicolás Maduro is a “good guy”. American-led regime change interventionism has a well-documented and historically undeniable history of increasing suffering and death in the nations in which it takes place, and consistently fails to accomplish what its proponents claim it will. You don’t need to have any opinions about who Maduro is as a person to recognize this self-evident fact and oppose yet another US regime change campaign in yet another oil-rich nation.

To preempt the inevitable Godwin’s law counter-argument here, of course it’s useful to discern individual behavior patterns in people and talk about what specific patterns they tend to exhibit. Of course it’s useful to recognize that Hitler did many things that we should always oppose going forward. But notice how the only reason Godwin’s law exists is because the “good guys versus bad guys” dichotomy allows people to associate anyone who opposes their side with Hitler, thereby marking them as the “bad guy” side in a given debate. That’s all anyone who fulfils Godwin’s law is ever trying to do.

It’s very useful to pay attention to the specific behavior patterns of specific individuals, and to make distinctions as to whether or not those behavior patterns are desirable or undesirable to you. But it’s also very useful to understand how the “good guys vs bad guys” dichotomy is leveraged by those who seek to control our thoughts and perceptions.

Think about it: where are we trained to look for heroes in real life? Soldiers and policemen, the violent enforcers of the status quo. Politicians like Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders, depending on which side of the fake partisan divide you’re on. And where are we trained to look for villains? Dictators and rule-breakers, and people who are on the other side of the illusory partisan divide.

Awful convenient for those who benefit from maintaining the status quo, no?

There is one direction in which we are very seldom trained to look for a superhero to come to the rescue, and that’s within. The notion that we ourselves might be the real agents of change in this world is downplayed by the propagandists who fear a surge in populism more than they fear anything else in this world.

Much better to keep people focused on polarizing figures like Donald Trump, who most people seem incapable of viewing as anything other than either a Deep State-fighting superhero or a Hitler-like supervillain whose actions are either all pure good or all pure evil. Divorced from the “good guys vs bad guys” dichotomy, this administration’s behavior can be described in the same way as its predecessors: mostly supportive of the violent and increasingly Orwellian pillars of empire, with a few helpful things mixed in. Yet it’s rare to find anyone who is capable of discussing Trump outside of the false dichotomy.

And the same would be more or less true of whoever Trump winds up running against in 2020. Even if by some miracle Bernie Sanders or Tulsi Gabbard overcome the rightward-slanted DNC nomination process and go on to beat Trump in the general election, they will with absolute certainty advance many of the destructive agendas upon which the US empire is built. They are not heroes either. This doesn’t mean they’re villains, it just means that “heroes versus villains” is an illusion we’ve been trained since our earliest media-consuming days to buy into.

The world makes a lot more sense when you peel away the lens from your eyes which perceives life in neat little Hollywood-shaped narratives with protagonists and antagonists and clear beginnings, middles and ends. Because it turns out that we’re all actually a bunch of confused primates doing the best we can with the wildly unique and incredibly complex sets of conditioning we’ve been dealt by our individual birth circumstances and life events. The “good guys versus bad guys” dichotomy is just imaginary conceptual overlay on top of a giant biological storm which carries on in cool indifference to our puny little egocentric narratives.

Atoms swirl, cells cluster, and life lifes away as this strange new species stumbles around trying to make sense of the world with its recently evolved extra gray matter and the capacity for abstract thought which comes with it. It has some successes and many failures in trying to figure out how to make living on this spinning rock a little more harmonious, and it will either succeed or it will fail. It’s egoically comfortable to slice this dance up into a narrative about heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys, but it’s really all one twirling, churning, chaotic and beautiful dance.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/07/05/good-guys-and-bad-guys-are-a-hollywood-illusion/

Empire of Lies = Not the Good Guys - Vox Popoli

 Andrew Anglin explains why he believes the Chinese – yes, the terrible Chi-Coms – are observably the good guys at this current juncture in the space-time continuum:

The Chinese are the good guys, but it’s important to note that they are not the good guys because they want to do charity for the world out of some spirit of niceness. It is a uniquely Western idea that a government would go around the world trying to help people out of the kindness of their hearts.

And we can all see that while the people in the US and EU are constantly talking about how good and moral they are and how they are on a mission to bring “democracy” and “human rights” to everyone on earth, the actual results are endless war and ridiculous poverty. They also bully people, because they claim they have established a universal moral order (based on nothing, by the way).

We can see, pretty clearly, that while some people might be stupid enough to believe that the Western governments are on a mission of love, this stance of “we are the most moral people in the world” is just a cover for corruption and violence.

Personal charity is a good thing and it’s actually a Christian moral directive. It’s good to help people when you can. It’s good to give a bit of money to someone who is struggling, if they’re not just going to buy drugs with it.

Organized charity, however, is virtually always a gigantic scam. I’ve written in some detail about the foreign adoption scam, where these groups (usually branded as evangelical Christians) go around the Third World buying babies from their mothers to sell for a profit in the US. There are a few good books on this (I recommend “The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption” by Kathryn Joyce, if anyone is interested in the topic – it’s sort of fascinating). Christian “adoption” agencies being literal human trafficking rackets is one of the more extreme examples of charity organizations being a scam, but they’re all basically like this, including the environmentalist groups.

When you have national governments claiming that their purpose is organized international charity, that is really obviously a scam. We know it’s a scam because we can see all these people do is start wars and sanction countries into oblivion. “Foreign aid” is a bribery scheme to pay off a group of criminals in a foreign government so they serve the interests of the US Empire. These interests include both military interests as well as agreements to sell off a nation’s natural resources to Western companies. No country’s economy has ever gotten better because they received foreign aid any more than a junkie has ever gotten clean because the government gave him clean needles.

China does not claim to be doing any of this for charity purposes. They don’t make claims to be ultra moral people going around saving the world from itself. The basic Chinese premise is that both war and interfering in another country’s domestic affairs through other means are both bad for business.

The Chinese vision of the future is one where peace is based on trade rather than enforced through violence. It’s also a future where a nation-state can make its own decisions about its internal affairs, because meddling in other people’s affairs is destabilizing and ultimately a form of warfare that often or even usually leads to violent warfare. The Ukraine is the perfect example: the US/Europe went in and did a revolution to overthrow the elected government in 2014, and this eventually led to a war. The Chinese policy is “everyone just relax, we’re going to sell you high-quality products at reasonable prices.”

The last time China was involved in a war was in 1979 when they sent troops to Cambodia to protect the Cambodians from a Vietnamese invasion. Think about that. How many wars and interventions has the US done since 1979?

When one contemplates the observable facts, it’s very, very difficult to dispute Anglin’s conclusion. There is absolutely no possibility anymore to attempt to claim that the USA, the US government, the US military, or even the US citizenry, are a force for good on the planet.

Even from my very limited personal perspective, I have to admit that the Chinese government has been courteous and respectful to me, while the US government and its proxy corporations have relentlessly persecuted my family members and put considerable effort into suppressing me as well as dozens of my acquaintances. I’m not banned from Tik-Tok, but I’m banned from YouTube. Chinese publishers are happy to work with me, while I’m blacklisted by US and UK publishers. US journalists write hit pieces about me, while Chinese state television welcomes my opinion on economic matters.

And it’s not the Chinese who are causing banks all around the world, including in the UK, to refuse to accept US clients. It’s long past time for US citizens to ask themselves, like that hypothetical SS officer in the comedy sketch, “are we the baddies?”

Now, obviously, not being a binary thinker, I don’t believe there are any good guys in the global geopolitical scenario. Not the Chinese, not the Russians, and not what passes for the various establishment Christian churches. But as should be completely and obviously clear to everyone by now, there are some particularly and especially and historically very bad guys who are active today, and regardless of whatever name one prefers to recognize them by, they have to be stopped by absolutely everyone who isn’t subject to them.

Whether we are good guys or not. Which, apparently, I am not, because, you know, skulls…

DISCUSS ON SG

https://voxday.net/2024/08/19/empire-of-lies-not-the-good-guys/

All Along the Watchtower - by Robert W Malone MD, MS

 But I never really allowed myself to confront the possibility that we might not be the good guys, the white hats.  Until I experienced what we have all been through over the last two years.  A government (or really multiple governments) that clearly believes that it is justified in disregarding fundamental principles of bioethics and the common rule.  And like many others, once I saw that, it was like having backed into a light switch and suddenly the entire room was lit up, and I could never un-see what was revealed.  Are we always the good guys? 

"There must be some way out of here"

Said the joker to the thief

"There's too much confusion

I can't get no relief

Businessmen, they drink my wine

Plowmen dig my earth

None of them along the line

Know what any of it is worth"

Before I was de-platformed by Twitter for posting the famously accurate Canadian COVID Care Alliance video, before I was de-platformed by LinkedIn for the same reason, before the infamous Joe Rogan hit #1757 where I said the three little words “mass formation psychosis” that caused the Silicon Valley overlords to loose bladder control, many feared that I was “controlled opposition”.  And for good reason. 

I have spent most of my career deeply involved in the US Biodefense enterprise.  I have worked closely with biodefense research teams at USAMRIID, DTRA, and MIT Lincoln Lab. I was once a business partner with a retired CIA officer who was deeply involved in the DoD biodefense enterprise, and I have co-published with another.  I once worked for the Dynport Vaccine Company, which had the DoD contract for “advanced development” (basically, clinical testing) of virtually all biodefense medical countermeasures for the US Department of Defense. My father worked as a federal defense contractor all his life, as did my father in law.  In my father’s case, it was mostly in high energy systems- including developing technologies for protection against the electromagnetic surge effects of “the bomb” as well as exploding foil – the technology used to trigger “the bomb”.  My father in-law ran the Raytheon special projects division – basically a CIA gadget and technology shop.  Think “Q” from the James Bond series. This is a byzantine world that I have deep understanding of, and direct experience with for virtually my entire life. I lived by the mantra which all DC bureaucrats know – keep your head down, because if they cannot see you, they cannot shoot you.

But I never really allowed myself to confront the possibility that we might not be the good guys, the white hats.  Until I experienced what we have all been through over the last two years.  A government (or really multiple governments) that clearly believes that it is justified in disregarding fundamental principles of bioethics and the common rule.  And like many others, once I saw that, it was like having backed into a light switch and suddenly the entire room was lit up, and I could never un-see what was revealed.  Are we always the good guys?  Or is this just more interchangeable Spy vs Spy, where ethics and roles and fungible and “situational”.  A world in which there are no good guys, no white hats.  Just a matter of media spin, perspective, and realpolitik.  The world as envisioned by Henry Kissinger and Klaus Schwab.

And by the way, “biodefense” is big business. Yet more weapons of war.

Most of us that are not deep into the mass formation process at this point can see the coordinated pivot from legacy media pushing the COVID fear-porn to the same outlets pushing the “Putin crazy bad man - Zelenskyy good man” theme.  But almost as soon as the shooting war started, a more nuanced and complex counter-narrative cropped up. 

• That is the deep ties between children of key Democratic party leaders and Ukrainian petroleum industry interests. 

• And the USA-sponsored bioweapon research facilities located throughout Ukraine, including along the Russian border. 

• And the legitimate Russian concerns about NATO efforts to geopolitically encircle Russia. 

• And the issue of whether Zelenskyy is really just a western puppet, rather than being the populist leader that has been pitched to us.

• And the surreptitious hand of World Economic Foundation meddling in all of this.

Things started looking a lot more complicated that just “Putin crazy bad man - Zelenskyy good man”.

I love to illustrate key points with stories based on personal experience. I have been told by people who would know (including Major General (ret.) Philip K. Russell, MD), that over many decades, the total expenditures of the US Government in developing biowarfare agents exceeded the money spent on thermonuclear weapons.  A case can be made that modern understanding and technology relating molecular biology, microbiology, and virology is fundamentally a “civilian” byproduct of a massive investment in biowarfare tech by US, USSR, and other governments. 

The latest evolution of these technologies is that we appear to have the CCP of the People’s Republic of China, which seems to recognize no ethical boundaries, pushing the limits of the brave new world of “transhumanism”.  Which in turn becomes a justification for western nations basically making the argument that “since they are doing it, we have to do it”. An increasingly sophisticated next generation of biological warfare. Where people become the weapons of choice for governments that give us no choice. For further on that, please see our prior Substack "Human Augmentation – The Dawn of a New Paradigm". 

Back to my story to illustrate just what we are up against here, as told by those I used to hang with (who may be inflating their self importance). The history that was relayed to me is that the real event which catalyzed the fall of the former Soviet Union was actually the development breakthrough of a binary (two part) bioweapon which could be delivered via an airborne route. So lethal was this weapon, that it could basically stop tank commanders and their crews in their tracks. According to this version of reality, the major military tension and strategic concern between the former USSR and Western Europe involved Russian Tank battalions which were poised to be able to blitzkrieg all the way to the English Channel. A threat which the western European states were acutely aware of, consequent to Hitler having successfully deployed the same strategy. The west basically had no way to mitigate this threat, or so the story goes, so it was always hanging over any geopolitical tensions which would arise from time to time between the European NATO states and the USSR.  Apparently the binary biologic was so potent that it would kill or incapacitate the tank crews so quickly that it negated the risk of blitzkrieg. Of course, this is just one story, told to me by friends in high places - so unverified. Be that as it may.

The point is that biological warfare agents are potent, cheap, easy to manufacture (particularly compared to thermonuclear devices), readily deployed, and have changed the tide of history on many occasions.  Back to the “Indian” wars, where smallpox was basically weaponized from time to time against indigenous peoples in North America.  And probably all the way back through recorded history.

So now we have the emerging rich documentation of US sponsored bio labs scattered across what had increasingly become the US client state called Ukraine.  

If you want to dip your toe into that topic, dive down that rabbit hole, please see the following:

“EXCLUSIVE: Deleted Web Pages Show Obama Led an Effort To Build a Ukraine-Based BioLab Handling ‘Especially Dangerous Pathogens’”

“BREAKING: Biden official says US working with Ukraine to prevent bio research facilities from falling into Russian hands”

“US Embassy Quietly Deletes All Ukraine Bioweapons Lab Documents Online – Media Blackout”

“China urges U.S. to release details of bio-labs in Ukraine”

“China urges US to reveal details of US-backed biological labs in Ukraine – including types of viruses stored”

“Russia Negotiator Charges It Now Has Evidence of ‘Biological Weapons Components’ in Ukraine That Show ‘Good Reason’ for Invasion”

“WHAT HAVE FAUCI’S FRIENDS BEEN UP TO IN UKRAINE?”

Here’s the point. Once upon a time, the US engaged in thermonuclear war brinksmanship with the USSR because of Russian missiles being placed on Cuban soil.  The weapons of war have evolved. Bioweapons technologies have matured. What would the USA do if Russia was transforming Mexico into a client state and had placed biowarfare research laboratories along our southern border.  Would we invade?  I strongly suspect so. 

Are “we” the good guys or the bad guys here? 

Or is this just more Spy vs Spy, with a strong dose of fearporn administered to the general populace by the legacy media to insure that we “think” and behave as the Overlords desire us to.

"No reason to get excited"

The thief, he kindly spoke

"There are many here among us

Who feel that life is but a joke

But you and I, we've been through that

And this is not our fate

So let us not talk falsely now

The hour is getting late"

 https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/all-along-the-watchtower

2020 – a Year of Living Dangerously - By Jim Quinn

In Part One of this article I detailed my inability to predict the timing of events during this Fourth Turning, while maintaining the catalysts of debt, civic decay, and global disorder continue to drive the world towards a cliff.

“Every schoolchild will know what happened next, from the Oh-Ohs to the 2020s, as the Fourth Turning unfolded—but academics will surely debate how and why it came to pass. In his history, this great-great-grandson of today’s baby girl will reflect on what the Fourth Turning came to mean for his own time and generation. His history is not yet written. What will it be?” – Strauss & Howe

The Trump team is now poised to go on the offensive as this Constitutional crisis intensifies and hurtles towards a violent conclusion. Barr and Durham are busy building a case against the Obama administration and their illegal activities before and after the election. As the election approaches and Durham concludes his investigation, indictments handed down on Clapper, Brennan, Comey or any of the other conspirators would lead to turmoil not seen since the Civil War. No matter the result of the upcoming election, neither side will accept the outcome.

This country is irretrievably broken and there will be no compromise or negotiated agreements. With Virginia Governor “Blackface” Northam attempting to overturn the 2^nd Amendment and forcefully confiscate lawfully owned firearms from his citizens a modern-day Harper’s Ferry confrontation could be in the offing. There are no viable political solutions to our current dilemmas. It’s just a matter of when and where the conflict goes hot and blood is spilled.

The domestic turmoil and disintegration of societal norms is a big enough risk by itself, but the international conflicts swirling across the globe add a particularly dire dimension to the twelfth year of this Fourth Turning. As we entered 2019 I thought the likely global recession would lead to further international tensions and possible military conflict. The flooding of the entire world with central bank produced liquidity has continued to shroud the deteriorating economic conditions in the U.S, EU, China and Japan.

The Fourth Turning: An...William Strauss, Neil ...Best Price: $6.50Buy New $13.09(as of 10:00 EST - Details)

If trillions of fiat had not been electronically pumped into the system during 2019, as the ruling oligarchs panicked at the thought of reality setting in, the global economy would have crashed, along with stock markets around the world. GDP only appears to be positive due to Fed money printing and the government running trillion-dollar deficits. They have managed to delay the inevitable crash, but they have only ensured it will be the worst in history.

I’ve found it fascinating how the various factions have reacted to the assassination of Soleimani and the subsequent reactions and over-reactions of the competing narratives. It provides a window into the thought processes of Republicans, Democrats, neo-cons, the left-wing media, Iranians, Iraqis, Israelis, Russians, and Chinese. Soleimani has been described as a brutal terrorist responsible for the deaths of over 600 American soldiers. He has also been given credit for defeating ISIS in Syria. We’ve been told he was beloved by the Iranian people. We are now being told he is despised by the Iranian people.

We were told this act by Trump would lead to World War 3. Shortly thereafter, the initial Iranian response was tepid, except for their military incompetence in shooting down a civilian airliner. Iraq’s response was to demand all American troops leave. Trump’s response was no, revealing we are actually an occupying force and not an ally of Iraq. Israel quietly foments discontent and turmoil across the region to keep the focus off itself. Russia and China support Iran economically and militarily in order to offset Americans dominance of the region. Confusion reigns.

The right is ecstatic over the developments since the assassination. Trump is on the offensive. The left-wing politicians and their media lackeys look like fans of terrorism and a teetering religious extremist regime. The goal of the neo-cons is for regime change in Iran, just as it was in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. Look how well that worked out. Everything we touch in the Middle East turns to shit. We were told taking out Sadaam Hussein and Gaddafi would lead to the glorious democratization of these nations.

Instead it turned them into dangerous, terrorist infested, hell holes where the population despises America. We were unsuccessful in creating ISIS to bring down Assad in Syria, with Russia and Iran doing the dirty work in destroying ISIS, and Trump taking credit. No one knows what happens if Khamenei and his regime are overthrown. But I’m sure the result won’t be what we were told it would be. Blood will spill and society will disintegrate just like every country we have “helped” achieve freedom.

It almost seems like that’s the plan. None of the guys running these Middle East countries are good guys. Of course, the guys running Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel are bad guys too, but we aren’t bombing them or assassinating their leaders. As has been clearly revealed during the ongoing coup attempt against Trump, the U.S. government/Deep State/Surveillance State is overflowing with bad guys doing bad things around the globe. Xi and Putin are brutal dictators who will resort to any tactic to retain power and enforce their will upon the world scene.

Essentially, the so-called leaders of this world are corrupt power-hungry arrogant oligarchs. The average Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, Russian, Chinese, and American are decent people trying to make a living and enjoy some semblance of happiness during their short stay on this planet. It’s our “beloved” leaders who create turmoil, wage wars, steal the money of their citizens, exhibit hubristic pomposity in their actions, and wield far more power than the people should allow them.

Anyone with an ounce of critical thinking skills knows none of this is about freedom, democracy or doing the right thing. It’s about oil and it’s about the military industrial complex requiring enemies to keep the profits flowing. The tripe about America being energy independent is easily sold to a dumbed down willfully ignorant populace who believe any propaganda emanating from the boob tube. The shale “miracle” is just another delusion built upon easy money pumped out by the Fed. No one can make profits on shale oil at $60 per barrel.

The powers that be know the truth. That is why the Deep State promotes global disorder, particularly in the countries with the largest oil reserves – Venezuela, Iran and Iraq. By installing puppets in these countries, the oligarchs are trying to ensure a continued flow of cheap oil to power their military and keep their debt saturated Ponzi scheme alive. Keep rooting for the good guys, except they don’t exist. The world is filled with good people, governed and manipulated by bad people.

The year we have entered has all the makings of other historically important years which have fallen during the eighty-year cycles ending in a period of crisis. Eighty years ago we entered 1940, with World War 2 underway, the U.S. still experiencing the effects of the Great Depression, and 65 million future deaths over a five year period, as destiny and the generational configuration of the world assured the destruction of the existing social order.

Eighty years before World War 2 was the somewhat eventful year of 1860. The American experiment was about to go through the bloodiest most tumultuous five years in its history. Over 700,000 men, 8% of the fighting age males in the country, brutally killed in a no holds barred fight to the finish. The country would never be the same, as the Federal government assumed ever increasing power and states lost power. Eighty years prior was 1780 as George Washington and his ragtag army of farmers were on the verge of defeating Cornwallis and his professionally trained army. A new nation was about to be born.

2020 is destined to be an eventful year just by the fact it is a presidential election year. The result of this election will not be accepted by the losers. The months leading up to the election will be a circus. Propaganda, misinformation, and outright lies will be spread like manure. Of course, voting will not alleviate the issues which will continue to drive this Fourth Turning towards its climax – debt, civic decay, global disorder.

We have entered the extreme greed phase of this debt-based Ponzi scheme. The stock market is in the blow-off stage, where earnings, valuations, and rational thinking are meaningless. Momentum and a delusional belief in the infallibility of the Fed are all that matter. Who knows how far it will go, but fear will eventually rear its ugly head, and a cascading collapse will make a lot of useful investing idiots very angry for the third time in the last two decades.

“Modern fanaticism thrives in proportion to the quantity of contradictions and nonsense it pours down the throats of the gaping multitude, and the jargon and mysticism it offers to their wonder and credulity.” – William Hazlitt

As the daily chaos of our modern existence hastens towards its tumultuous denouement, the masses are too distracted by their iGadgets, non-stop social media trivialities, games of sport, and ceaseless propaganda from corporate fake news media, to understand they are being used and will bear the brunt of the coming storms. The system is rigged, but the riggers are arrogant, and their arrogance will be their undoing.

The continuation of the current lull in this greater depression is completely dependent upon an ever escalating level of unpayable debt and an ever increasing level of delusional belief by the willfully ignorant financial elite that there will be no negative consequences to their deceitful actions. I expect this bubble to burst during 2020, but I’ve been wrong for a long time, so my level of confidence in this prediction is low. I am soberly convinced my assessment for the remainder of this Fourth Turning in last year’s 2019 preview still applies:

Against the Left: A Ro...Llewellyn H Rockwell JrBest Price: $13.57Buy New $8.00(as of 09:15 EST - Details)

Based upon history, the resolution will not be based on compromise, civility, reason, or peaceful means. The combustible combination of unpayable debt, civic anarchy, and global chaos are set to detonate, creating an era of maximum darkness, death, destruction, and decisions. Making America Great Again will require personal sacrifice, dreadful choices, survival skills, intelligent decisions, and the courage to win at all costs.

I don’t know what events will dominate the coming year, but I do know the intensity of hate and vitriol will increase. I do know military conflict in the Middle East will expand. I do know the political machinations in this country will surge as the election approaches. I do know the Deep State will do everything in their immense power to undermine Trump. I do know the Fed will QE and Trump will cheer every new stock market record. I do know I will be lied to and propagandized by the mainstream corporate media.

Lastly, I do know the risk of catastrophe rises as we approach the climax of this crisis. The outcome is uncertain, but the trials awaiting will surely test our strength and fortitude. I hope enough patriots will do the right thing and lead the country to a new beginning.

“The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. Thus might the next Fourth Turning end in apocalypse – or glory. The nation could be ruined, its democracy destroyed, and millions of people scattered or killed. Or America could enter a new golden age, triumphantly applying shared values to improve the human condition. The rhythms of history do not reveal the outcome of the coming Crisis; all they suggest is the timing and dimension.” – Strauss & Howe

Reprinted with permission from The Burning Platform.

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https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/01/jim-quinn/2020-a-year-of-living-dangerously/

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The War in Afghanistan Is a Fraud (and Now We Have Proof) - Lee Camp

Bombs have numbers. Humans have names. Our American military boasts a skill and passion for using numbers to turn names into yet more numbers. But these numbers have grown so gargantuan and out of control that one struggles to comprehend them.

In just 10 months in 2018—the latest numbers made available—our military dropped 5,982 munitions on Afghanistan, turning many thinking, living and loving names into cold, lifeless numbers. Over the span of the war, 43,000 Afghan civilians have been numberized. We, as Americans, essentially never even notice when it happens. Statistically speaking, it will happen again many times today, and no one in America will really care. (At least not while the game is on.)

64,000 Afghan security forces have been numberized since 2001.

Our government has known for years that the war in Afghanistan is a jaw-dropping disaster on the level of “Cats”: the movie. How do we know they knew? The Washington Post actually just published some impressive reporting, taking a step back from its lust for pro-war propaganda. (The last time it achieved such a feat was during the O.J. Simpson trial. The first one. The one with the glove.) The Post unearthed a trove of thousands of internal government documents that expose the catastrophic war. And it turns out there are Tinder dates between a young neo-Nazi and an old Jewish lady that have gone better than this war.

“[The document trove] reveals that senior US officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable,” the paper reported.

Let me translate The Washington Post’s fancy-pants language: U.S. officials didn’t “fail to tell the truth”; they fucking lied. The phrase “failed to tell the truth” oozes around the brain’s neural pathways, strategically dodging the anger receptors. “Failed to tell the truth” sounds like veracity is a slippery fish U.S. officials just couldn’t catch.

424 humanitarian aid workers have been numberized.

Let’s take a moment to consider the motivations and goals of the war in Afghanistan. The U.S. ostensibly invaded the country to stop al-Qaida from attacking us in any way, namely by flying large planes into our buildings. We achieved this goal within the first couple months. With al-Qaida essentially decimated, it seems logical that we should have left the country, reserving the right to return if any other big passenger airplanes came after us.

But we didn’t leave. We never leave. Rule No. 1 of the American empire is “Never Truly Leave a Country After Invading.” In order to explain our continued presence, we had to move the goal post. To what? We weren’t sure. We’re still not sure. Nearly 20 years later, if you ask a U.S. general or president (any of them) what the goal is in Afghanistan, they’ll feed you a word salad so large it’ll keep you regular for months. In fact, we now know that even during some of the earliest years of the war, the Pentagon and the Bush administration didn’t know who the bad guys were. (Right now you’re thinking it’s rather juvenile and uninformed of me to refer to enemy forces as “bad guys,” but, as you’ll see in a moment, our government literally spoke about them in those terms. Side note: This is because murderous rampages by war criminals are always juvenile. Murder, by definition, is unevolved.)

According to the Post’s Afghanistan Papers, an unnamed former adviser to an Army Special Forces team said, “They thought I was going to come to them with a map to show them where the good guys and bad guys live. It took several conversations—[a]t first, they just kept asking: ‘But who are the bad guys, where are they?’ ”

Yet we Americans were instructed in the early years that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had everything under control. To imply otherwise was to make a mockery of tens of millions of yellow ribbons. But in reality, Rumsfeld, too, had a sizable bad-guy problem.

“I have no visibility into who the bad guys are,” he said behind closed, locked, soundproof doors. Meanwhile, Rumsfeld publicly and boldly led the nation in a well-defined and decisive victory in the land of the Afghans.

In 2003, he said, during a press conference alongside Afghan President Hamid Karzai, “General Franks and I … have concluded that we’re at a point where we clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction and activities.”

Yep, no more major combat—just 17 years of reconstruction (and activities). Apparently, most U.S.-backed “reconstruction” is done from the air, via bombs. Let that be a lesson to you, rest of the world: You better not screw with us or we’ll reconstruct you and your whole family!

67 journalists have been reconstructed during the war in Afghanistan.

Is two decades too long for an utter, unmitigated disaster? Maybe we can stretch it to three? We’ve been funding warlords and extremist jihadis and hoping they will play nice. Yet American presidents have continually told us we’re making progress. “Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as Afghanistan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015, ‘What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.’ ”

I imagine that quote particularly upsets many Americans, because if there’s one thing we’re good at, it’s having a foggy idea of what we’re doing.

Vietnam: foggy idea.

Iraq: very strong foggy idea.

Libya: one hell of a foggy idea.

Unfettered capitalism: the foggiest idea.

To put it simply, we are the best at bad ideas. But these Afghanistan Papers unveil a pretty terrible picture. One we need to confront as a nation and not just sweep under the rug (and not just because the rug would have to be the size of the Pacific Rim).

Upon hearing these revelations, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer did his best impersonation of someone who gives a shit. He said:

A bombshell series of investigative reports from The Washington Post exposing heartbreaking truths about the U.S. war in Afghanistan, which has claimed some 2,400 U.S. lives and cost nearly a trillion dollars. The Post says … officials routinely lied to the American people about the war. … This is truly a bombshell.

Yes, it’s a bombshell—despite the fact that much of the information in the Afghanistan Papers has been known for a decade or more. Back in 2012, I myself was doing poorly written standup comedy bits about how our government funded both sides of the war in Afghanistan. This goes to show that the mainstream media has two priorities—one is to spout the U.S. government’s talking points, and the other is to distract us all from the whitewashing of history.

They help Americans believe that we just found out about the failures in Afghanistan; that we just started McCarthyism, and it didn’t happen before in the 1950s to horrific consequences; that we just now discovered the breathtaking environmental consequences of factory farming. (I’m kidding—corporate media will never report on that. You could have a CNN anchor tied up in a sack in Gitmo, and he would still refuse to admit factory animal farming is killing the planet at an aggressive pace.)

But Blitzer wasn’t content pretending to be shocked that the Afghanistan War isn’t going well, so he put his acting chops to the test by further postulating that there also might be flaws with the war in Iraq. He said, “I can only imagine and brace for a similar report about the long U.S. war in Iraq as well. I suspect that could be some horrifying news as far as that is concerned also.”

That’s right: As of last month, Blitzer thinks there might be some problems with the war(s) in Iraq. (Blitzer strikes me as the type of guy who wouldn’t notice if you stole his pants off him in negative-10-degree weather.) Yes, Wolf, not only has there been similar mismanagement and mass war crimes committed in our invasion of Iraq, but you, in fact, helped manufacture consent for that war as well. You are complicit in the deaths of millions of people who will never come back from numberization.

Throughout the past 20 years, the mainstream media reiterated the lies told by our various presidents. They beat those lies into our heads with impressive frequency. Lies like those told by President Obama, when, in 2012, he said on national television: “Over the last three years, the tide has turned. We broke the Taliban’s momentum. We’ve built strong Afghan security forces. … Our troops will be coming home. … As our coalition agreed, by the end of 2014 the Afghans will be fully responsible for the security of their country.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty thrilled for the war to be over in 2014—whenever 2014 may come.

3,800 contractors have died in Afghanistan for these lies.

The Afghanistan Papers show that not only has the 20-year war been wasteful of human life, it’s also been wasteful of money. Of course, this is the point when you think, “The military— wasteful?! Well, paint my nipples and call me Phyllis Diller; that’s the damnedest thing I ever did hear!”

Yes, this is hardly shocking, since $21 trillion has gone unaccounted for at the Pentagon over the past 20 years. That’s two-thirds of the amount of money wrapped up in the entire stock market. Money has been flowing into Afghanistan so fast that officials aren’t even able to waste it quick enough! (I wish that were a joke.)

From the Post’s report, again: “One executive at USAID guessed that 90 percent of what they spent was overkill: ‘We lost objectivity. We were given money, told to spend it and we did, without reason.’ … One contractor said he was expected to dole out $3 million daily for projects in a single Afghan district roughly the size of a US county.”

The contractor said he couldn’t conceive of how to spend $3 million a day for people literally living in mud huts. Well, I guess USAID should start handing out furniture built out of blocks of shrink-wrapped hundred-dollar notes. Maybe fill bean bag chairs with small bills. (If you aren’t yet outraged enough, please keep in mind that, according to The New York Times, adjusting for today’s dollars, it would take less than eight days of the Pentagon’s stated budget to give the entire world clean water for a year, thereby saving millions of lives and turning the U.S. into the most beloved nation on earth.)

But rather than accept our own corruption and war profiteering, our military placed the blame squarely on the Afghan people. Per The Washington Post, “The U.S. military also accused Afghan commanders of pocketing salaries—paid by U.S. taxpayers—for tens of thousands of ‘ghost soldiers.’ ”

Although ghost soldiers sound like an incredible and tough-to-defeat resource, I think they meant the Afghan commanders claimed they had a certain number of soldiers, but most weren’t real. So America can’t fund the health care of our own goddamn real soldiers who get home and wait in line for months to secure any semblance of care, but we can fund ghost soldiers half a world away?!

Donald Trump just cut food stamps to 700,000 people, impacting more than a million children, but we’re funding fucking ghosts? Maybe we could start a campaign asking the ghost soldiers to donate some of their supper to the starving kids of America.

Ghosts seem to be an ongoing difficulty for the U.S. In the same issue of The Washington Post containing the Afghanistan Papers, there was an unrelated article titled, “The U.S. Wasted Millions on Charter Schools” that said, “A report found that [during the Obama Administration] 537 ‘ghost schools’ in America never opened but received more than $45.5 million in federal start-up funding.”

Apparently we’re funding ghost schools and ghost soldiers, and almost nobody in our government seems to give a shit! I guess you could say they give a ghost shit—it’s not really there.

Yet the problems in our forever war don’t stop at the walking dead. The Post says, “The US has spent $9 billion to fight the problem [of opium] over the past 18 years, but Afghan farmers are cultivating more opium poppies than ever. Last year, Afghanistan was responsible for 82 percent of global opium production.”

But what The Washington Post doesn’t tell you is that a lot of that opium was for use inside the U.S., to fuel our opioid epidemic.

An American becomes a number every 11 minutes from an opioid overdose.

So how does our government respond when revelations like the Afghanistan Papers come out? A few senators pause in the middle of their T-bone steaks and red wine to say, “This needs to be looked into, I daresay.” But then a few days pass and they just give the Pentagon more money to sink into a black hole.

The spending bill just passed by Congress sends $738 billion to the Pentagon. And, as RootsAction stated, it contains “almost nothing to constrain the Trump administration’s erratic and reckless foreign policy. It is a blank check for endless wars, fuel for the further militarization of U.S. foreign policy, and a gift to Donald Trump.”

To put it mildly, asking the Democrats to stand up against endless war is like asking Anne Hathaway to bench-press a Chevy Tahoe. It’s not going to happen, and she has no interest in even trying.

42,000 Taliban and insurgents have been numberized.

That may sound like a successful war to some, but keep in mind that the U.S. military likes to categorize anyone it kills “an insurgent.” The Pentagon goes by the theory that if it kills you, then you’re an insurgent—because if you weren’t an insurgent, then why did it kill you? A great many of the 42,000 were truly innocent civilians.

If there’s one thing we should learn from the Afghanistan Papers, which the mainstream corporate media have already ceased talking about, it’s that ending these immoral, illegal, repulsive wars cannot be left to our breathtakingly incompetent and corrupt ruling elite, who have provably been lying to us about them for decades. So it’s up to you and me to stop them.

Lee Camp’s new book “Bullet Points and Punch Lines” with a foreword by Chris Hedges is available for pre-sale at LeeCampBook.com.

This column is based on a monologue Lee Camp wrote and performed on his TV show “Redacted Tonight.”

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-war-in-afghanistan-is-a-fraud-and-now-we-have-proof/