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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2024-052
Last week's post on Moon of Alabama:
Blogging:
Ukraine:
Middle East:
> On one occasion, a handful of children, all about ages 5 to 8, were carried to the emergency room by their parents. All had single sniper shots to the head. These families were returning to their homes in Khan Yunis, about 2.5 miles away from the hospital, after Israeli tanks had withdrawn. But the snipers apparently stayed behind. None of these children survived. <
Russia:
Misc:
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Other issues:
Assange:
Germany:
Use as open (not related to Ukraine or Palestine) thread …
Posted by: Lavrov’s Dog | Feb 19 2024 3:53 utc | 107
Well, i dont watch youtube, but from your writings, i pretty much agree.
There is cataclysmic failure coming on every front of humanity.
And it has been said before, through all ages, but this time I think it actually is different because the greatest technological advance of our age is related to our evolutionary definer; our brains.
Perhaps there will be a deus ex machina, (literally god from the machine), and AI will solve all our problems. I dont know.
I am not a minimalist because i care about the environment, (though I do, greatly), nor because I care about the direction of humanity, (I do, greatly), nor because I care about about money, (I do, greatly)….
Its because all of life’s consumerist pleasures bring me NO JOY whatsoever. I do not like anything. My last material posession I loved was a Lego set, 30 odd years ago. I’ve tried to understand, I’ve bought nice things, and I just felt… Nothing.
I don’t like stress, I dont like big house. So I simplified, and Ive never been happier.
I do however, (or used to, until I learned to gamedev), like playing computer games.
So, perhaps, AI will make Virtual Reality so addictive, that people will simply cease wanting material things, and instead will live lives plugged into a matrix of fantasy, leaving food, water, and shelter, even procreation, to a central AI system.
It may sound horrifying to old timers, but to me, I would be fine with that, and it could conceivably actually stop the destruction of the planet.
If you look around you, we are already halfway there. Been to a bar lately, been anywhere lately? Where are peoples minds and faces? What are they focused on?
However, all that said, I still think man made global warming is bs. Maybe 1or2% is from humanity’s CO2.
I think trying to solve it, is… Interesting, as long as it does not go overboard, like, darkening the sky woth aerosols, as Bill Gates and others have proposed.
Then you get into making a situation worse trying to solve a problem.
Posted by: UWDude | Feb 19 2024 4:29 utc | 110
@Patroklos | Feb 18 2024 20:53 utc | 41
Yes, as a historian, when I have to explain an event and the choice is between deep-state 5D-chess-playing lever-pulling illuminati, or simply sheer incompetence, I’ll take the latter every day and twice on Sundays.
Then you’d probably be wrong seven days a week (and twice on Sunday). The problem here is thinking, and then teaching others, that someone needs a detailed masterplan to pursue a successful conspiracy. It does not work that way. They simply need to plant their operatives, to infiltrate, to have sleeping cells, informants, and then simply seize the moment. If you think that Israel financed and favoured politically Hamas in the 1980s, because they already knew that on October 7th 2024 they were to launch their masterplan, you are crazy. But if you think that Israel was so incompetent up to October 7th 23:59, and then, since October 8th 00:00, so efficient in pursuing their long-desired plan of ethnic cleansing Gaza, you are gullible.
Not to mention that Israel has a long history of false flags and conspiracies from Operation Susannah to the FLLE.
Posted by: SG | Feb 19 2024 14:01 utc | 132
Agree. I would add that the argument of incompetence is a shield for the conspirators, and it’s a narrative their minions actively push- for instance, Larry Johnson, ‘Ex-CIA analyst’ harped on poor training protocols of the IDF for weeks after Oct7.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
The ruling powers of the west do everything they can to prevent the people they oppress from knowing themselves, and from knowing who their enemies even are. Feigning incompetence is a deception. The faces put before the public often are incompetent, but they are not the planners and decision makers. The active component of the ruling class is really quite clever- hardly anyone, even here, is able to see that the war in Ukraine was never a war against Russia, it was and is a war against Europe, driven by all the factors that drove the previous two wars in Europe. The core strategists in the US are winning THEIR war handily, the SMO in Ukraine is just a tool for the complete subjugation of Western Europe. Perhaps one or two European leaders have been in on the plan, and it suits their greed to implement it, but most of them are still unable to figure it out, let alone the public in the west, or even in this bar.
If you follow the economics closely since 2008, it is really rather obvious in hindsight that this was the inception of the plan that led to the SMO. The twin blows of the Maidan and the trashing of the Iran nuke deal were a pincer movement to cut off EU from cheap oil, deindustrialize it, eliminate EU as an economic competitor and shift high-tech manufacturing to the US. Iran nuke deal could have helped the EU countries stabilize after 2008, but the loss of a new energy source, new markets for the EU manufacturing base (EU itself was saturated, witness Greece, Portugal, etc), and massive infrastructure projects forced ECB into American-style QE. Not having the petrodollar, this was suicidal, and made the EU economies more and more vulnerable to financial attack- such as that conducted by the US via the sanctions war ‘against Russia’ but really against Europe. Purely from open source, mostly MSM reports, I figured this out ten days after Trump killed the Iran nuke deal, a deal, btw, that is exactly the kind of deal Trump loves- but higher powers did not. What on earth was the point of killing the deal? What did the US have to gain? First answer- the continuing instability of EU economy. Then start looking around at other initiatives and the Maidan jumps out- a pet nazi regime perched on the energy route from Russia to the west…
This is not stupidity, it’s not incompetence, it’s a very clever strategy to maximize benefits to the core US financial class while pushing off as many of the ultimate costs of the 2008 financial crisis onto others, particularly Europe. As long as people insist on see the PTB as incompetent, they will be unable to penetrate the haze and will make terrible predictions, support their own oppressors, and fight their own allies. Grow up. These bastards are smart, well educated, and better informed than the rest of us. If you want to oppose them, you have to be smarter, and so far I don’t see much of that in the western opposition to any of the crimes of the PTB.
Posted by: Honzo | Feb 19 2024 17:23 utc | 149
@ Honzo and SG have misunderstood what I meant in a rather myopic way, thinking that if I default to incompetence as an explanation for what look like fuck-ups then it precludes other explanations. I’m not going to bother with the more subtle version, suffice it to say that context and history are complicated and not reducible to the universalism of a bourgeois worldview in which causation is sought in rational action.
Posted by: Patroklos | Feb 19 2024 18:34 utc | 161
You should perhaps say what you mean.You’re not very good at saying what I mean.
I do not deny that there are many layers of incompetence in every human endeavor. However, if we allow ourselves to be satisfied with this explanation when examining events of great moment, we will inevitably miss the underlying truth. People in the bar seem to be fond of attacking others for not crediting Hamas with the intelligence and skill and determination to mount the Oct 7, but not only is that not at all what I have said, it is ironic to hear from the same quarters that all is explained by Israeli incompetence.
The fact is, the west is governed by an active cabal of the financiers- not the ones that work in banks, but the ones that own the assets that are employed by the ones that work in banks. The people are, by and large, neither stupid nor ignorant. Their world view has constraints, of course, but what really constrains their actions is the fundamental nature of finance capitalism. They own a system that is inherently unstable, and demands constant resets and shoring up with other people’s wealth. This leads to adventures which will inevitably fail- but so what? They server their purpose in the meantime, which is to protect and concentrate the power of these elites. However, as Uncle Karl pointed out so long ago, this process is fueled by wealth from outside the system. That is becoming much more difficult to extract, and the system is on the brink of collapse. Short of saying, ‘oh well, it was nice while it lasted’ and retiring to a remote part of New Guinea, they are left with choices that will fail, and now we are in the end cycle in which they will fail faster and faster. Even so, they have a lot of knowledge, and vast experience with this game, and they make clever plans to keep it going a little further- such as the war of the US vs Europe which is going nicely, but hardly anybody, even in Europe, understands is happening.
I think that Netanyahoo understands this, and he took a wild gamble to save his own neck- probably without the knowledge of or against the advice of the CIA. He did it to stay out of jail, to implement the Zionst dream, and to drag the US into actively facilitating his designs, and it’s working. It wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t incompetence, it was deliberate.
In order to implement this plan, Netanyahoo personally nurtured Hamas. Not everyone in Hamas bought into the plan, though- to have power Hamas had to recruit authentic Palestinian patriots willing to fight against Israel. These have shown themselves to be hard to control, so the attack that Netenyahoo wanted on Oct 7 was not the one he got, and now his ass in a sling.
Nutty’s plan was not brilliant, but given his personal situation, it was the only plan going. Hamas- or the part of Hamas that has distanced itself from the Muslim Brotherhood- has used Netanyahoo’s plan to use them to save himself brilliantly against him. Even if the nukes start flying, the Israeli state will be gone in a relatively short time, which I think counts as a W for Hamas.
The ‘saner heads’ in the US desperately want out of the Gaza mess, but too many of their useful idiots are all in on it. Their options, however, are limited to those that will not obviously collapse the system in short order. There’s not much left.
Invoking incompetence is not a helpful guide to predicting the future. Understanding the interests of people in power and the mechanisms and limitations of the system they operate is much more useful.
Posted by: Honzo | Feb 19 2024 21:49 utc | 195
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