Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn Discuss Ukraine, Censorship and Insanity

Fascinating discussion about Ukraine, censorship and the insanity of the neocons (of the U.S. and western Europe). Here's an excerpt from a much longer conversation titled "Gambling with Nukes" by Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi 0:16

There's a gamble implicit in it. You are firing missiles at a nuclear power and you are gambling that they are not going to fire them back, right? And there was, there were actually quotes from American officials talking about how, you know the real irresponsible people were the Russians. They were the ones you know, who were being irresponsible. Let's see what was the quote? The EU foreign policy chief Joseph Burrell said it's not the first time that Putin plays the nuclear gamble, okay? And this was before the launch of the British missiles, and after the launch of the of the ATACMS missiles. And then, and then this guy, [British Prime Minister, [Keir] Starmer, who comes out, and he looks like a cross of Max Headroom and Noel Coward. I mean, like, I can't even that the whole presentation is so disturbing. This like kind of blinking creature who speaks in that bizarre accent, just repeating catch phrases over and over again while he talks about firing missiles at Russia. It just seems crazy, right? And then that is succeeded by new news that came out that, apparently, the French are going to be next, and they're going to, they're going to be sending something called SCALP missiles into Russia. And, you know, then we get the ICBM fired back. Walter Kirn 1:59 Well, they're, they're all they're all making themselves targets, aren't they? I mean, they're lining up. Should there be any doubt about the legitimacy? Who cares about legitimacy? Who cares about all the rules anymore these? Who cares about the norms? Dude, they just broke the biggest norm in history, which was to send our missiles into a nuclear state to land and explode. That's the biggest norm in American or world history, since those kind of things were invented, frankly, so the rules based international order--that's out the window. Norms are out the window, not shooting missiles into the home territory of the greatest nuclear power next to the United States is out the window. All of this being led by a lame duck American president who is all week in South America, while his vice president, who just ran for president, is vacationing in Hawaii. Well, Aloha. The whole mask is off.

The thing that scares me is how these people ever expect that they and their party will be taken seriously for five seconds should they ever try to float a peace message or a humanitarian message. Again, the party of social justice, and in England, the left wing party, the Labor Party, to which Starmer belongs, are at a moment when we have actually, in the United States, the center, the crown, of this power structure, voted out our executive It is beyond insane, and it will not end well. Matt, just as I was upset on Monday, I can tell you that next week we will be even more upset. Things are going to happen, and things are already happening every day, when this missile went off this morning. Every power in the world that has modern warning systems had an alarm go off right for the first moments after its launch. The United States had to assume that it was under nuclear attack.

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Continue ReadingMatt Taibbi and Walter Kirn Discuss Ukraine, Censorship and Insanity

Andrew Sullivan on Ukraine

Andrew Sullivan:

There was something truly surreal about President Biden suddenly changing course and agreeing to give Ukraine advanced long-range missiles to attack deep inside Russian territory in the last two months of his administration. There was no speech to the nation; no debate in the Senate; just a quiet demonstration of unilateral presidential fuck-you power. You know: the kind we’ve long worried about with Donald Trump. The missiles up the ante considerably against a nuclear power for a simple reason. As Putin noted:

[E]xperts are well aware, and the Russian side has repeatedly emphasized this, that it is it is impossible to use such weapons without the direct involvement of military specialists of the countries producing such weapons ... We consider ourselves entitled to use our weapons against the military facilities of those countries that allow to use their weapons against our facilities. And in case of escalation of aggressive actions we will respond also decisively and mirrored.'

There was a time when a NATO missile strike on Russian territory, followed by a Russian threat to attack NATO “military facilities” in response, would have caused the world to stop dead, paralyzed by the fear of nuclear armageddon. Yet here we are, blithely preoccupied by Pete Hegseth’s sexual exploits and Congressional bathrooms.

Others are not so sanguine. “I believe that in 2024 we can absolutely believe that the Third World War has begun,” Ukraine’s former military chief, Valery Zaluzhny, warned yesterday, noting both the new involvement of NATO troops and the involvement of North Korea. Our own president, having brought us much closer to the brink as a lame duck, seemed unconcerned. He was last seen wandering off-stage in the vague direction of the Brazilian rainforest. Not optimal.

The UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, was even punchier, and pledged to allow Ukraine to use British long-range missiles as well: “We need to double down. We need to make sure Ukraine has what is necessary for as long as necessary, because we cannot allow Putin to win this war.” When asked if he was prepared to risk the UK forces or Ukraine or a third country like Poland being nuked in response, as Putin has threatened, Starmer simply ignored the question. ...

The brinksmanship over Ukraine will set a precedent for brinksmanship over Taiwan. What Putin and Biden have done — by allowing this conflict to persist, despite no chance of a conventional military victory for either side — is to render the world far less stable and far more dangerous than at any time since the end of the Cold War. Quite a legacy for a president we were assured was a foreign-policy master.

Continue ReadingAndrew Sullivan on Ukraine

Casey Means on the Dysfunctional Priority of HHS

Casey Means, MD:

[When] you go to the hhs.gov website, which everyone should do right now on a browser, the entire banner, the entire top of fold of the page is Risk Less, Do More. Okay? They say it flat out, it is a campaign for vaccine awareness and uptake. So it's like, the entire personality of the HHS right now is get vaccines. It's literally, and this does not matter what you're feeling people's feelings around vaccines. It's weird and myopic that the actual thing that's torturing and shortening American lives right now is not mentioned. Then I invite everyone to go to the hhs.gov priority document of priorities for America. This PDF mentions vaccines 27 times. It does not mention the words chronic disease, diabetes or obesity: the things that are costing trillions of dollars to the American health care system. I mean, 70% of our GDP goes to health care, $4.5 trillion a year, and they are trying to essentially jam down our throat that help is found in a syringe, and it's it's just, again, this has nothing to do with how people feel about vaccines. It is myopic. It's distracted. And when you follow the money, you realize that it is intentional.

Continue ReadingCasey Means on the Dysfunctional Priority of HHS

Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson Discuss Ukraine and Propaganda

What follows is an excerpt from a Nov 20, 2024 discussion between Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson. This is a critically important discussion regarding recent developments in the Ukraine War and related U.S. Propaganda:

Glenn Greenwald [00:18:53] Tucker, there's nobody I'm certain of this in the United States, just an average, ordinary American voter who believes that their life is affected in any way by the question of who rules various provinces in the Donbass in eastern Ukraine. Nobody thinks about Ukraine, let alone the Donbass, let alone eastern Ukraine. It's an incredibly complex situation there in terms of the people's allegiances, which are far closer to Moscow than they are to Kiev. The question of what that territory should be, should it be somehow autonomous, should it be used as a buffer against the West? The whole framework, as you well know, and as other people have pointed out, when Russia agreed to the reunification of Germany, which was obviously an extraordinary thing for the Russians to agree to, given the Russian history in the 20th century with respect to Germany, when they opened, the Berlin Wall fell and they allowed the eastern and the western parts of Germany to reunite and to become part of the West and become part of the EU. The only concession they extracted in exchange for that was with reunification. NATO's now moving eastward, closer to our border in a country that has devastated our country twice in two world wars, invaded Russia twice, killed tens of millions of Russian citizens. The only thing we need as a security guarantee in exchange for allowing that is that NATO will never expand one inch eastward beyond what was East Germany and the United States agreed to that. And immediately in the 90s, an administration, the administration started talking about it and implementing NATO's expansion eastward toward Russia. Exactly what was promised to Gorbachev the United States would not do in exchange for them agreeing to reunification. And why? Why? Why did we need to expand eastward toward Russia. And now it's not just eastward in general. It's going directly up to the Russian border on the part of their border that has been invaded twice in Ukraine to destroy Russia. And both of those world wars, we also participated in the change of government. We removed the democratically elected leader of Ukraine before his constitutional term was expired in 2014 because we perceived him as being too friendly to Moscow, which is what the Ukrainians voted for and replaced him. [U.S. State Department's] Victoria Nuland constructed a government and they was replaced by a government that was more pro-U.S.. Imagine if the Russians engineered a coup in Mexico to take out the government because they were too friendly to us and put in a hard line, pro Russian, anti-American, anti-NATO president. Imagine how threatening we would regard that as. And that's exactly what we did in Ukraine. The question is, though, this has nothing to do with the national security of the American people. No American is threatened by who governs Ukraine. What they're threatened by is what the United States is doing in Ukraine, including this most recent act.

... This is not a lame duck decision and it's not like there was any emergency to it. It wasn't there was no emergency to it. They just wanted to escalate it because they thought Trump wouldn't. And so they did.

Tucker [00:27:52] It puts us in this remarkable moment where the only adult is Vladimir Putin. This person, we've been told, is Hitler and deranged, crazy, dying of nine different kinds of cancer can't be trusted like the only reason we're not. I mean, we're all relying on his restraint. That's just a fact right now. How weird is that?

Continue ReadingGlenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson Discuss Ukraine and Propaganda

While We Take a Break from Fighting Wars, We Fight Proxy Wars Cheered on By the News Media

Dave Smith:

I just I hate them so much and I really think they deserve it. And it's not just that they lie about everything. It's like they lie about everything and then they have the nerve to morally judge us. If you just watched even just the last few weeks of the Trump election, they're not in the business of reporting the news. They're totally just in the business of making you feel like you're a bad person if you don't fall in line with the regime.

America has this giant war machine, right? We're always at war. We're the most war-hungry country in the world. Even if we're taking a little bit of a break from a war, we'll fight two more proxy wars while we do that. America looks back at the 90s--Bill Clinton--as the time of peace and prosperity. We call it peace because we only fought a war in Serbia and had a blockade around Iraq, and we're bombing the crap out of Iraq, with a few other military interventions in there too. You know, the UN estimated that Bill Clinton's sanctions and bombing regime of Iraq--everyone just thinks of George H.W. Bush's war and W's war--but Bill Clinton was bombing Iraq and he had a full blockade around the country. The UN estimated that 500,000 children died of starvation or malnutrition due to the blockade. Now, I've heard people argue, by the way, that that number is exaggerated. Maybe it wasn't 500 that maybe it was only 100,000. So that's the time that we consider "peace" when we were just starving 100,000 children to death in Iraq. And everybody in the corporate media are in the business every single one of those wars. You've sold them. Everyone. My entire life. The media sold those wars and you're gonna morally look down on me. You're gonna judge me, motherfucker? You're in the business of baby murder. Get the fuck out of here. You're looking down, judging an American because maybe I'm going to vote for Donald Trump? Or maybe I dare to question the results of the last election? Fuck you!

Continue ReadingWhile We Take a Break from Fighting Wars, We Fight Proxy Wars Cheered on By the News Media