Here’s Tony Blair talking about lighting fires all around Russia in its neighbours in 2008.

There’s so much other evidence, including the infamous 2019 Rand Report Overexteneding and Unbalancing Russia, where US analysts recommend sanctions, sabotage and civil war. But all that takes time to digest and requires substantial additional reading to fully understand. My friend is busy.

What I promised my friend instead was a video from Stanislav Filin who runs the YouTube chanel, S Filinom (сФилином literally translated as “With Filin”). The video was released in early March 2021 to explain the Russian side of the start of the Ukraine conflict. Stanislav is a straightforward ordinary young guy with a talent to connect with people, not a long-winded intellectual like Professor John Mearsheimer. Plus if you want to know the Russian perspective, ask a Russian.

I went to Stanislav’s channel expecting to find the video in less than five minutes and just drop a link to it in Signal to my friend. With ten minutes of hard searching, I couldn’t find it. Not by searching for “American”, not by searching for “Ukraine”, not by searching for “Donbass” in both English and Russian. I found something about Stanislav’s Buchta video being taken down, which made me suspicious that this video was lost. It turned out to be the case. Here’s where it should be on YouTube.

YouTube placeholder page for censored video

The video in question was called something like “How to explain to Americans why Russians moved to protect the Donbass on February 24”.

Next step – I had to find Stanislav’s other channels, which happily enough, are also called sFilinom. There’s Telegram (fairly complete though inconsistent), there’s Dzen, there’s VK.com. On Dzen, one can even find his entire Bucha video in good quality and in English but there’s only 8 videos there, out of the . VK.com only starts on 1 January 2022 so of course no video.

But still no sign of the mystery video.²

In a search on VK in Russian for sFilinom and Bucha, I managed to find a compendium of Filin’s political English language videos. It starts with the mystery video and included the Bucha video, the Arnold Schwarzeneger video.

Here’s the full table of contents with original titles:

• What you don’t know about the war in Ukraine (video banned)
• A response to Arnold Schwarzenegger (video still on YouTube)
• Must See!! Advisor to Zelensky said WHAT??!! (video banned)
• What Ukraine is HIDING from YOU (video banned)
• What you must know about BUCHA (video banned)

Don’t bother clicking those YouTube links. Only the “Response to Arnold Schwarzenegger” is still online.

Now that I knew that the video did exist and I wasn’t imagining it and knew the exact title, I’ve managed to find another copy on Bitchute. It turns out there are thirteen copies.³

And another copy of just What you don’t know about the war in Ukraine on VK.com. Don’t expect to be able to easily find this material via US search engines like Google, DuckDuckGo, Kagi or Bing, even with an exact search like +sfilinom What you don’t know about the war in Ukraine. DuckDuckGo at least includes some VK.com results which will get you close, and in turn uncovered a well-stocked sfilinom TikTok channel.⁴

Anyone who wants to better understand the Russian perspective on the Ukraine conflict and why Russians consider the US the aggressor owes it to him or herself to watch What you don’t know about the war in Ukraine. The video is only five minutes long. To listen to the other side is the basics we are taught at high school debating. Or which all mediators or even competent businessperson learn. Anyone who doesn’t have five minutes to listen to the Russian perspective about what looks like it will develop into World War III and nuclear armageddon loses the right to have an opinion on Russia, Vladimir Putin and the Ukraine conflict.

Lead image of Odessa Trade Union Massacre by Aleksandr Polischyuk

Go ahead, learn what the other side thinks, in their own words, in plain English. It will only take five minutes.⁵

Apparently this left space for the sales team to make a two decimal point typo and sell the NFT for 0.75 of an ethereum coin instead of 75 ethereum. In the real world, clerical price errors like this are usually undoable on high ticket items. Not so in the dog-eat-dog digital world. The sale happened instantly, with no redos.

In the comments to “Bored Ape” NFT Sells For Just 1% Of Expected $300,000 Price Tag After Fat Finger Listing, [jzerohedge](https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/bored-ape-nft-sells-just-1-expected-300000-price-tag-after-fat-finger-listing) notes:

The fact that people buy things like this and bitcoin shows just how stupid we all are and is the reason why all of these psyops by TPTB work so well.

It is things like this that they use to measure the stupidity of the people. When people adopt things like this, we have reached peak stupidity and they can influence the masses to do anything… like take an experimental vaccine and force your children to get it.

jzerohedge is right. To my eye, buyer gets worthless digital junk for 1/100 of what idiot buyer was prepared to pay. The whole episode sounds like part of a poorly conceived, dystopian science fiction movie. The worst Twilight Zone episodes made more sense than real life today.

At least a whole lot of people can now answer the question of what they would have done in Germany as the Nazis came to power — resist, or be a good German.

The answer to that question we now know is very little. As Goebbels noted, the masses are easily led. Even in a country like the United States with a tradition of free speech, it appears free speech can be more or less suppressed both socially and legally within a single generation. What’s worse is how few people seem to care.

“If it keeps us safe from [Terrorists | Trump | Republicans | Libertarians], then I agree. I don’t need free speech.” I’ve heard this grovelling for safety by censorship in these words from at least four adult North Americans in the last year.

What is at the the root of the loss of critical thinking? SDShack has a theory:

Idiocracy. People literally have a 5 second attention span. There is no way you can engage any critical thinking processes when you simply flip from one video/audio stimuli to another. This is deliberate programming and nothing else. Only breaking the cycle will allow for any chance at returning to a functional society, which is why TPTB have gone all in on doing EVERYTHING to maintain their brainwashing.

Indeed, it is shocking at how difficult it is even for trained critical thinkers to maintain their concentration in the Social Media Age. Raising generations to be unable to sit and concentrate and think for themselves is extremely frightening.

Gone quite appropriately reminds us that, based on past performance, trusting authority in the West is really not much better than trusting authority in the Soviet Union or a theocracy:

Well known psychological fact that people go for the easy option and the easy option is to trust the government and do what they say. Same people who gave you Thalidomide and Mad Cow Disease.

The language of the question is important runningman18 reminds us:

The poll says they support censorship of “misinformation”….that’s how they rig the stats. How do they define “misinformation”? Anybody polled would interpret it differently according to their politics. Democrats are so dumb and indoctrinated they think there is actually such a thing as “hate speech” and they think it’s legal to ban it. Of course they think “misinformation” is legal to ban also. What if the poll asked them “Is it okay to censor information?” It’s all about how censorship is presented. Despotic governments always present it as a “greater good” situation….

The goal here was clearly to present that most or nearly most Americans support censorship (“suppression of misinformation”). Poll seems to have been weighted in an unrepresentative way according to JimmyJones:

if you look at the method they are giving weight to minority respondents and sampled way more Dems, as usual. By doing that, especially now with weighted values they can make the poll reflect anything.

So it’s a nonsense poll created to manufacture consent for censorship. As G.W. Bush would say about the Iraq war in May 2003, Mission accomplished! G.W. Bush would follow that up a month later in Afghanistan: “America sent you on a mission to remove a grave threat and to liberate an oppressed people, and that mission has been accomplished.”

Perhaps free speech is not as dead as the Jack Dempsey, CNN and the Democrat party would like us to believe. As Afghanistan’s tribes eventually liberated themselves from the foreign imperialist yoke, with persistence and over time guerilla thinkers can bring critical thinking and open debate back to Western society.

Photo by Kyle Cleveland.

As a senior engineer at Google for many years, Zach was aware of their bias, but watched in horror as the 2016 election of Donald Trump seemed to drive them into dangerous territory. The American ideal of an honest, hard-fought battle of ideas — when the contest is over, shaking hands and working together to solve problems — was replaced by a different, darker ethic alien to this country’s history.

Apparently already in 2016 Google was rewriting its algorithms to make sure searches smear Donald Trump and praise Hillary Clinton. WB at Zerohedge notes:

In 2016…

Typed “Donald Trump” into Google and all the search results were anti-Trump. Typed “Hillary Clinton” into Google and all the search results praised Hillary.

It was so painfully obvious that Big Tech and mainstream media was no different than state-run media in present-day and past China, Russia, Iraq, East Germany, etc.

AND YET, liberals in my circle of family and acquaintances CANNOT SEE THIS. “Snopes proves yet again that Trump is bad, Hillary is good. See?” Idiots.

While I don’t particularly like Donald Trump, not so much for his politics as his sharp business practices⁶, it is not the place of a technology company to attempt to decide an election (2016) or participate in a conspiracy to decide an election (2020). The idea of a level playing field was a huge part in the culture of North America up until the last twenty years and was important to how North American companies outperformed Europe and other regions. The alternative to a level-playing field is nepotism and rigged courts, both of which rarely end well for the civilisation which embraces them.

The separation of politics and business were very important to the success of North American business. Most companies were focused on business and excellence, not on state handouts and lobbying for political favour.

Citizens, whether of the United States or elsewhere, deserve a free media, not a captive media consolidated in the hands of six deeply establishment corporations. Citizens also deserve elections free of interference from tech providers who should remain neutral. It should not be Google’s job nor Facebook’s job to tell people how to think. That they do recalls the state papers of the Soviet Union – Izvestia, Pravda, Krasny Zvezda, Trud – they were all the news and they all printed the same thing: what the party wanted proles to think.

I thought the US goal was to defeat the Soviet Union in the name of freedom, not to adopt its worst practices.

Image credit: Project Veritas.

I’m a midlist-level author of unusual literature, and a political satirist, and a blogger, basically, and yet Facebook, and their partners at the Atlantic Council, and AstraZeneca, and Pfizer, and Moderna, and who knows which other global corporations and transnational, non-governmental entities like the WEF and WHO, consider someone of my lowly status enough of a threat to their “New Normal” narrative to warrant the attention of the Reality Police.

What happened to Hopkins is that he found that most who reposted his Facebook post "Impfen=Freiheit" (showing the Berlin tower with those words projected on it) found their accounts disabled and required to upload ID. This is the message many saw, accusing them of consorting with terrorists, mass murderers and human traffickers!

Platform monopoly was bad enough when Facebook was just spyware ¹ and Twitter was useful only as a kind of DM service for software writers to interact directly with each other.² Now that Facebook and Twitter are no longer neutral platforms but highly policed parts of the MSM, effectively a comments section for the MSM, the transformation of the internet world is almost complete. Rather than an open plain where ideas and innovations roam free, the online space is becoming a tightly fenced in corral.

No matter where you look, all the channels say the same thing again. Any dissenting voice is denied social media distribution. Social media and the internet have become a wonderful narrows from which to exercise control. CJ Hopkins calls reality-policing "ideological conformity".

And that is how reality-policing works. It’s a bullying operation, basically. The entire “cancel culture” phenomenon is. “Cancel culture” is a silly name for it. We are talking about a global empire imposing total ideological conformity (or, in simpler terms, its version of “reality”) on the entire planet through fear and force. The Nazis referred to this process as Gleichschaltung.

Sandy from the comments section tried reposting Hopkins’ "Impfang=Freiheit" graphic and had it deleted.

I made an experiment yesterday and reposted the Tower post shown above in FB to see what would happen. In my particular circumstance FB does not suspend me or notify me of anything. They just delete my stuff. I posted two items on the above article content and they just wiped it from my page without notice of any kind. For about 3 years i’ve noticed near zero distribution of my posts which are 95% political news. I have 500+ friends but less than a dozen and usually only 3 or 4 may respond. This is the silent blocking and throttling treatment that is probably what most are experiencing but don’t even know it’s happening. FB is social engineering of the very worst kind.

Basically if you do not support the current "reality" narrative you are silenced.

This is what Gleichshaltung is about. Drowning out any other voices except those which promote the party and its goals for the state. Humans are social animals. By silencing discussion, the state effectively controls 90% of the people who "get along to go along". Yes, we’re talking about the same 90% who supported dunking witches, the Spanish Inquisition and persecuting Galileo Galilei for heliocentrism in 1633. We know what happened to witches (if they sank they were not witches but drowned, if they floated, they were witches and were burned), Galileo suffered house-arrest until his death, the Third Reich generally condemned its dissidents to concentration camp. What does the "New Normal" have planned for dissidents?

Until now modern Western society has generally cut off contrarian voices economically. The most dangerous journalists seem to off themeslves with astonishing regularity. Those who are not dead are either in prison (Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning) or in exile (Edward Snowden) if they ran fast enough. Once on a wartime footing though, humans celebrate intolerance in those "on their side" and violently crush as a group any dissent.

Normals now perceive Assange and Snowden as enemies of the people and traitors who should be assassinated. It never ceases to astonish me that the war crimes brought to light by Assange and the illegal spying exposed by Snowden generate far less public indignation than Assange’s and Snowden’s exposure of those crimes.

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There’s clearly been a shift in the fabric of Western society visibly over the last five years, and in a creeping way since the G.W.Bush/Cheney presidency.³ In the last five years, the US Government and its "partners" like the Atlantic Council have been moving us to a wartime footing against Russia and China and Iran. There’s been incoherence in the shoves and pushes, one day pushing against Russia and the next week against China, once a month against Iran. The issue is not who is the enemy but which one who would like to take on first.⁴ The unifying theme though is one of active war.

We are basically on a pre-war footing now. The Atlantic Council has been invited to take control of social media, directly controlling standards on Facebook and advising Twitter. The Atlantic Council has never been a friendship group, but always a lobbyist for the drang nach Osten, which was supposed to have ended with the Second World War.

Current, honorary and lifetime Atlantic Council directors list reads like a bipartisan rogues gallery of American war-criminals, including Henry Kissinger, George P. Shultz, Madeline Albright, Frank Carlucci, James A. Baker, R. James Woolsey, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta.

[fvplayer id=”13″]

Not only is it extremely disturbing is how well-financed the Atlantic Council is (though it always has appetite for more whether to spend on luxury travel or "fellowships" for compliant journalists – it’s amazing how much more appetising the words bribe, propaganda and war-mongering sound wrapped in a fellowship), it’s even more disturbing who is funding the Atlantic Council. The usual suspects such as Chevron, The Blackstone Group, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, BP, Exxon, the US State Department, Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs Trade & Development and Her Majesty’s Foreign office should surprise no one. On the other hand, it’s disturbing to see Google and Facebook as Strategic Partners and Twitter, 21st Century Fox, Microsoft as corporate partners. I would prefer to see social media and technology companies as neutral advocates of communication. Seeing them explicitly invest in propaganda ventures is disturbing.⁵

With Western governments on a war footing, the war-mongering Atlantic Council in charge of social media, our nominally free societies are entering a dark period of build-up to hot war. This means censorship, platform-banning and the total crushing of any dissent. ⁶

Did anyone sign up for the abolition of free speech during our lifetime? Silencing political discourse was certainly not on the curriculum during the 1980’s university of Toronto. As Canadians, we talked more about the importance of dialogue and maintaining a civil discourse, not about demonising and silencing those who disagree with us.

At least the future looks promising for dystopian authors.

In terms of the treatment of Uighurs in China, the only comment I would make is that violent revolutionaries and separatists in the West have been fairly harshly dealt with. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau declared martial law in the face of the Quebec separatist movement. Currently Catalonian elected members of European Parliament have had their immunity lifted and are subject to extradition to Spain where draconian prison sentences await them. Sedition is usually the charge we bandy about.

To leave the Uigher question for another day and more generally address the slave labour issue, dustinthewind makes a very good argument against general slave labour in China. Call it the Henry Ford argument.

The slave labor nonsense is BS as is the torture and selling of organs of the Uighars which came from on paper written by someone in Germany and has been proved false. Those in the west are simply gullible and governments using the media know that if they repeat something enough learning from Goebbels the public will believe. Weapons of mass destruction, a guy in a cave planned and coordinated 9-11, Syria gassed its own people, Russia invaded and stole Crimea, Contra drugs for weapons in Nicaragua, Chinese suppressing religion and “western values” in Hong Kong, destroying Venezuela and its population to remove another elected leader as in Ukraine, removing Trump and of course no election fraud, and its goes on and on and on. China has been building the largest consumer economy on the planet and many international firms like Volkswagen sell more units there than anywhere. Obviously you do not create the largest consumer economy and have the population buy things from all over the world if you are paying slave labor. The west likes to compare wages using exchange rates which the dollar being stronger than most other currencies gives people a false sense of reality. A good example in reverse is Japan back over 2 decades ago and the Big Mac index. Back then a Mac would cost you over $10 US dollars using our currency but obviously Mcdonalds could never survive if the Japanese were actually paying that much in yen terms in purchasing power. Using PPP how much does $100 yuan in China buy you compared to $100 dollars in the US if you bought the same exact items. The yuan would buy you everything on the list and have money left over while in the US the $100 would not even buy the whole list. So the bottom line is not only in China but other countries how far does a currency go in that specific country compared to how far does a dollar go in the US. The yuan has more buying power so using exchange rates to compare wages is misleading. The wages seem lower using this example as the west is famous for but in reality the yuan buys much more. You need more dollars in income to survive in the US hence higher wages when compared to other countries. That does not mean others are receiving slave labor. Their paychecks although lower simply buy more and hence why China now has such a large consumer economy. Last months retail sales there were a disappointment and the Central Committee met and their goal at that meeting was “How do we increase disposable income” and increase living standards” while Biden and his other communist and socialist are going to reduce disposable income, lower living standards, lower GDP, create more wealth inequality in a period of the economy headed for a depression next year which these polices are the last thing any sane human would do. Add in the cost of illegal immigrants and the next massive $4 trillion debt plan, the US is in trouble, big trouble. As Dr Hunt has said the government has taken and taken a larger piece of the pie from the people to survive and now even before the new taxes the economy can no longer generate any significant growth or job creation. Mismanagement on an indescribable scale. As he also states GDP does not subtract from the massive capital and wealth destruction from the lockdowns and these jobs and businesses simply cannot be replaced in a few years. The economic stats are misleading. GDP falling 32% and then going back up doesn’t account for the massive hollowing out from the destruction that it caused. China has now the largest economy surpassing the US measuring GDP using PPP and soon it will pass the US using nominal GDP as the polices in the west of the Great Reset will destroy western society and its economies. Again the models at Armstrong Economics also forecast China becomes the world’s financial center as capital will accelerate from west to east as the massive tax increases start in the west. The models are already tracking capital fleeing Europe to China buying mostly 3% bonds which will accelerate as we move into the future. China also last year has passed the US in foreign direct investment. Capital knows no national boundaries or ideology and will always move to where it can get yield and it believes is safe. The US and the west are losing that belief in safety and return as the dems controlled by the World Economic Forum are implementing their destruction of economies, fossil fuels, businesses, pensions, owning small businesses, etc. as the coming tax increases will wipe out the remaining middle class and create massive wealth inequality and massive job losses as we enter 2022 and the Great Depression. The US along with the west are headed for a breakup which is post 2032 and economic hardships starting next year worse than now.

I call it the Henry Ford argument as Ford revolutionised the car industry and created the largest car manufacturer in the world in 1903. By 1910, Ford was selling more Model T cars than all the other car manufacturers in the world. He did not do so by employing slave labour but by paying a living wage, allowing his own employees to buy Model T’s. In his own words:

I will build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one.

I’m not a huge fan of cars – cars have done and continue to do enormous damage to the natural world – more of a bicycle man myself. And I keep my bicycles for ten, fifteen, twenty years. Most of the bicycles I’ve retired were due to theft. But Ford is right here about living wages. One cannot sustain an economic boom by failing to pay workers enough to participate in general prosperity. If slave labour worked, the Pharaohs would still reign over the entire Middle East and would have taken over Europe too.

This charge of slave labour looks like another propaganda stick invented with which to beat China. It’s sad that our politicians and captains of industry only hope to win in business is by making up stories to exclude competition. Not a very free enterprise approach, I must say.

A study done a few years ago showed that over 2/3rds of international affairs stories in major European newspapers were basically reprints of NYT articles, tweaked lightly for localization purposes. The major media outlets all sing from the same hymn sheet and the CIA and other western intel operations knows that any story they feed into the system will be reproduced around the globe and taken as ‘fact’ by most of the newspapers’ readers. The media’s incestuous nature and its infiltration by the intelligence services really became apparent during the Syrian Civil War and the Trump presidency. It is now clear that the western mainstream media works with the spooks to shape and mold opinion, and manufacture consent, rather than innocently informing its readers about world events. The rise of the now often used insult “conspiracy theorist”, which is really code for “dissenting opinion”, is closely related to this. The western liberal democracies are going totalitarian in real time as the window of “acceptable” opinion continues to shrink and the establishment finds new ways to censor, ban and stifle heretical thinking.

Almost all print media has been run at a loss for the last fifteen years, as publishers “adapt” to a digital publishing model. It astonished me too that money losing businesses would continue operating at almost full speed. Tom explains the current media business model:

News publishers are all loss leaders. Their goal is to provide the daily bread of propaganda to feed the masses. As Craig Murray recent tweet puts it “the Press is not a genuine commercial enterprise. It is a loss maker on which billionaires are happy to splash money to produce propaganda for tax, regulatory and governmental regimes that aid billionaires’ wider interests.”. The Epoch Times has recently been spending a lot of money on adds on you tube and I received in my mail box a copy of their rag just before Christmas. Propaganda works and you can see the results with “half of the US population chanting Russia did it and the other half China did it”. This sort of stupidity could get us all killed.

For mainstreamers winding up their conspiracy theory rattles, Antiwar7 reminds us that people who used to work in the CIA and the NSA (Edward Snowden) confirm the above.

Former senior CIA official John Stockwell discusses how the CIA would place false reports in newspapers around the world, including in the Washington Post. Stories that were complete fabrications, that were attacking their enemies, like Cuba. What a courageous man Stockwell is, to give up his career, his support network, and invite attacks from one of the most dangerous organizations around.

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Contributor Red Ryder met Stockwell personally:

He’s a terrific guy. Working for the NSC in the White House, he created the false stories about the Cuban soldiers raping nuns in Angola. That was his job. He’s been around in public since the ’80s but never got any Media attention. He also was CIA officer in the Vietnam Highlands working with the Hmong against the government. He married a Vietnamese. When the US pullout was ordered he was also ordered to sacrifice 150 agents in the Highlands who worked for him. The US wouldn’t take them out. His book “In Search of Enemies” is vital to read. He testified to Congress about the machinations of Henry Kissinger that were illegal, antithetical to US best interests, but no one gave a damn. Left him out on the limb. John Stockwell is a great voice of the Truth. A good man.

Ironic that a man who committed these crimes could be considered a voice of the truth and a good man. On the other hand, think of all those who commit war crimes and never give it a second thought.

As a former international journalist, I can confirm from first hand experience in Moscow that the news day for all the major television networks starts from the New York Times. The NYT in turn was in close communication with the State Department when I was working. It appears the NYT works more directly with DoD and CIA sources.

I know it’s hard to accept that you are lied to every day when you pick up the paper or turn on the television. It’s all part of a huge fabric of lies. Even back then journalists who told too much truth would quickly find themselves unemployed. I don’t much like The Matrix films (my partner Lucia loves them) but what the Wachowskis did get right was the red-blue pill model. So few people choose the red pill. Most people sleepwalk through life believing lies from the day they are born until the day they die. Quite sad really to spend one’s life taking sleeping pills.

Edward Snowden in some ways is a modern day Christ. He gave up his happy life at the center of NSA contracting and American prosperity to try to bring the truth to people. And almost no one wants to believe him, or even really cares, particularly in the United States. Now he must spend his life trapped in Russia, a country for which he has little affinity. Why? For telling us the truth behind the CIA and NSA lies about the extent to which our privacy and our lives have been violated.

Frankly, Edward should loosen up a little and enjoy life in Russia more. If you learned to code competently, you can learn Russian too. We only live once: enjoy it.

Everyone else – please wake up. Think of the improved dinner conversation – table talk with zombies is crushingly dull.

Pot calling the kettle black doesn’t start to describe this nonsense. Justin Case correctly points out that the US could have been investing in its infrastructure and its industry instead of blowing up other people’s infrastructure and countries, at great expense to itself:

US regime has got Chinese phobia. The war mongering nation is losing it’s status as a leading global economy and has become a leading global debtor nation. The country is falling to anarchy, and China is their concern? It’s too late to turn back the hands of time. All those wars cost money and lives. You borrowed money for non productive purposes. The USD is losing value on world markets, which is confirmed by the price of gold and silver. All empires end the same way, bankrupt.

THE US BLAMES EVERYONE ELSE Whenever a nation starts fighting with other countries, it is always done from a position of weakness. US debt has been running out of hand for a long time. Federal, state, corporate, personal, mortgage, auto, student etc, etc, they are all escalating exponentially. On top of that the US budget deficit will be in the trillions for the foreseeable future and the trade deficit was $600 billion in 2017. The whole world is living above its means but the US is the worst culprit. So what is the US doing about it. Well there is no question of adjusting your spending in line with your expenses. That would be much too simplistic. Instead you blame the whole world that it is their fault and that they must be punished. And this is exactly what Trump is doing now. It is China’s and everybody else’s fault that a major part of US manufacturing has moved to low cost countries. And it is these countries’ fault that the US is living above its means and borrowing and spending more that it earns. Therefore these nasty countries must be punished. And that is the reason the US has started a trade war. Trade wars are almost without exception a desperate measure taken by an ailing economy. A trade war, especially between the two biggest nations in the world will indisputably lead to a downturn in world trade and therefore also a major global economic downturn.

All apps have privacy issues. Lets not pretend the NSA backdoored apps are any better. Whats important is us end users to have CHOICE in selecting WHO we risk our data with. I’d rather not have the NSA and CIA have my data because they are a much greater threat to my liberty than China.

Microsoft gave in to NSA and gave them their VPN Tunneling encryption key of protocol (SSTP) and then you have OpenVPN – meanwhile MS holes in their OS is outstanding for anything that goes – What do you think telemetry is? This game is so pathetic when I hear people who seem to think that only other nations are spying on Americans are evil, but D.C is so benevolent, makes me lough at stupidity and arrogance. Every data, every keystroke you make especially on smart phones is recorded, ask Google about it, Amazon etc. and don’t give this Constitution rights, please that is a joke. So this hypocrisy is ridiculous, what is happening is competition and CISCO (one of them) is getting their asses whipped so are other U.S brands. This is about protecting a market turf and competition, plus other political moves.

When asked about the algorithm Mark Zuck’s response was “amateurs”.

In a recent report published by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, the CCP was said to have co-opted European political and business elites using “friendship groups”. These “friendship groups” seem to assist in educational and cultural exchanges between Europe and China, but they are in fact the mouthpieces and intermediaries that CCP proxies use to help with the CCP’s united front to divide Europe.

Imagine: the Chinese want to trade with Europe and spend billions of tourist dollars there. Europe agrees to trade and tourism. Outrageous! No way, we must the world safe again under US leadership: Cancel Friendship and make Wars!

Paint the Russians as poisoners and you only have to sacrifice a pawn for a new round of sanctions. The timing here makes it more than obvious that a Navalny poisoning would be to help US policy. This month has been taken up with the attempt at overturning the Belarussian state (it’s early in that game yet, there’s some more moves to be made but they depend on putting the Russians on their back heel) and sabotaging Nord Stream II.

Poisoning your own man at risk of death and/or lifetime disability is a substantial sacrifice to make, but to a cynical imperialist mind well worth it to either win Belorussia, shut down Nord Stream II or even both.

Micron makes the medical case in more detail.

I do not really see the point of delving into complicated medicinal debates. Even if one of us here was a qualified MD, even a doctor would need to have access to the patient’s records to have an informed opinion. So, we are all shooting in the dark anyway.

The problem is intractable. Russophobes will never trust the Russian doctors and results of tests done in Russia, as nobody can fully exclude falsification or political pressure.

Sane people (sorry, I meant non-russophobes) will not trust Germany either. I mean, Navalny was practically given a BND escort and Angela Merkel’s spokesman has already gone on the record accusing Russia in an underhanded way. How can you trust whatever the German doctors will say, in an hospital a few hundred meters from Germany’s political decision centers and literally swarming with BND operatives ? Which doctor will have the guts to contradict political leadership and risk being found at the bottom of the Spree in a few weeks ?

Only conclusion is that the beliefs that Navalny was or was not poisoned are equally infalsifiable and cannot be proven. I do not see what could be admitted as conclusive proof by all the parties.

So we can only fall back to the good old cui bono analysis. And here, simple logic dictates that poisoning Navalny is easily the worst move of the decade for Russia, at the worst possible time : when Russia is trying to stabilize the Belarusian situation, as well as completing Nord Stream II pipeline. We are asked to believe that Putin basically said “hey you know what, screw the international situation and my carefully nurtured strategic projects, I absolutely need to eliminate a guy who polls at around 2% for some elections no one outside Russia cares about, and which my party would have won anyway”. The same guy who for years has gone out of his way to appease Turkey in Syria, and has systematically been extremely cautious in the Donbass despite half of Russia clamouring for annexation.

When faced with all this, the only answers I saw until now from MSM/Russophobes are either
1. Putin doesn’t care about international opinion, he kills whomever he wants. Sure, then why doesn’t Putin annex Donbass, or bomb the Turkish military to smithereenr, or kill dozens of guys much more nefarious and influential than Navalny ?
2. Putin is just an evil madman.

It’s a testament to the West’s extraordinary propaganda machine that there are still people who can utter or imply such insanities without being laughed out of the room.

Any one silly enough to blame the Russian government for what happened to Alexey Navalny has either not been paying attention or is deliberating disseminating false information. Both type of players are useful to the US propaganda war on Russia (and China and Iran and Venezuela). The US list of evil enemies is becoming awfully long. Heck, long time targets Cuba and North Korea and Syria had to be temporarily shelved to leave enough attention for those four.

Imagine being a US asset now though. You would have to wonder when your masters are coming for you, when your sacrifice will be considered worthwhile.