Tag: russia

Dick Cheney’s Daughter Wants War

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), was interviewed by CNN’s Jake Tapper today. During the friendly discussion, Cheney, referring to the tragic bombing of a train station in Ukraine, made the outrageous claim that Russia is conducting a “genocidal campaign.” The embattled congresswoman has joined with many other Democrats and Republicans in dangerous hyperbole that could easily escalate already heightened tensions.

By any definition of the word, Russia is not involved in a “genocide” against the Ukrainian people. But if there is some new definition that we’re not aware of, Cheney should be careful with her condemnations.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, a key architect for the invasion of Iraq, would be just as guilty, if not much more guilty, as Russian President Vladimir Putin of “genocide,” if this new definition describes Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. 

Liz Cheney is singing the tune of the New York Times, the Washington Post and a who’s who of regime change proponents, all itching for a fight — or, at least, the threat of a fight.

And the chorus sounds very familiar. The band broke up after the 2003 invasion of the sovereign nation of Iraq. But leading up to that war, they were playing on every radio station.

There are many reasons that a war — or the talk of war — is desirable for policymakers and media “elites.” The first three that come to mind in this situation are the excuses offered by conflict for a disastrous economy, the need to bury years of U.S. political corruption in Ukraine, and Raytheon stock.

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CIA Admits Feeding Americans False Info About Ukraine

Last week an extraordinary article appeared in, of all places, NBC News, reporting that the US intelligence community is knowingly feeding information it does not believe accurate to the US mainstream media for the American audience to consume.

In other words, the article reports that the US “deep state” admits to being actively engaged in lying to the American people in the hopes that it can manipulate public opinion

According to the NBC News article, “multiple US officials acknowledged that the US has used information as a weapon even when confidence in the accuracy of the information wasn’t high. Sometimes it has used low-confidence intelligence for deterrent effect…”

Readers will recall the shocking headlines that Russia was prepared to use chemical weapons in Ukraine, that China would be providing military equipment to Russia, that Russian President Putin was being fed misinformation by his advisors, and more.

All of these were churned out by the CIA to be repeated in the American media even though they were known to be false. It was all about, as one intelligence officer said in the article, “trying to get inside Putin’s head.”

That may have been the goal, but what the CIA actually did was get inside America’s head with false information meant to shape public perception of the conflict. They lied to propagandize us in favor of the Biden Administration’s narrative.

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If It Feels Like You’re Being Manipulated, It’s Because You Are

If you’ve got a gut feeling that your rulers are working to control your perception of the war in Ukraine, it is safe to trust that feeling.

If you feel like there’s been a concerted effort from the most powerful government and media institutions in the western world to manipulate your understanding of what’s going on with this war, it’s because that’s exactly what has been happening.

If you can’t recall ever seeing such intense mass media spin about a war before, it’s because you haven’t.

If you get the distinct impression that this may be the most aggressively perception-managed and psyop-intensive war in human history, it’s because it is.

If it looks like Silicon Valley platforms are controlling the content that people see to give them a perspective on this war that is wildly biased in favor of the US narrative, it’s because that is indeed the case.

If it seems like a suspicious coincidence that Russiagate manufactured mainstream consent for all the same shady agendas we’re seeing ramped up now like cold war brinkmanship against Moscow, internet censorship, and being constantly lied to by the mass media for the greater good, it’s because it is a mighty suspicious coincidence.

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US lawmakers welcomed notorious Georgian warlord now boasting of war crimes in Ukraine

Having taken up arms against Russia for a fifth time, Georgian Legion commander Mamuka Mamulashvili has bragged on video about his unit carrying out field executions of captured Russian soldiers in Ukraine. 

While Western media pundits howled about images of dead bodies in the city of Bucha, echoing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy’s accusation that Russia is guilty of “genocide,” they have largely overlooked the apparent admission of atrocities by an avowed ally of the United States who was welcomed on Capitol Hill by senior lawmakers overseeing congressional foreign policy committees.

Having fought in four wars against Russia, and despite allegations that he played a leading role in the massacre of 49 protesters in Kiev’s Maidan Square in 2014, Mamulashvili has taken multiple trips to the United States, where he received a warm welcome from members of Congress, the New York Police Department, and Ukrainian diaspora community. 

In an interview this April, Mamulashvili, was asked about a video showing Russian fighters who had been extrajudicially executed in Dmitrovka, a town just five miles from Bucha. Mamulashvili was candid about his unit’s take-no-prisoners tactics, though he has denied involvement in the specific crimes depicted.

“We will not take Russian soldiers, as well as Kadyrovites [Chechnyan fighters]; in any case, we will not take prisoners, not a single person will be captured,” Mamulashvili said, implying that his fighters execute POWs.

The warlord’s battle dress shirt was emblazoned with a patch reading, “Mama says I’m special.” 

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Twitter Just Banned Ex-UN Weapons Inspector For Revealing Crimes Against Humanity Committed By Ukraine

On Wednesday, Twitter ‘permanently suspended’ retired US Marine Corps officer Scott Ritter.

By disputing Ukrainian authorities’ accusations that Russian soldiers massacred residents in Bucha near Kiev, Twitter accused the former UN weapons inspector of participating in prohibited behavior.

On his Telegram channel, Ritter shared a screenshot of the message he received.

“So apparently I’ve been suspended from Twitter for the crime of challenging the orthodox narrative of the so-called Bucha massacre”

He said hehad appealed the decision adding that “Freedom of speech in America today is an endangered concept.”

RT reports: According to the screenshot, Twitter’s censors had decided that Ritter violated their rules against “harassment and abuse” by saying the Ukrainian police had committed crimes against humanity in Bucha, and were trying to shift blame onto Russia with US help.

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How the U.S. Paid for Putin’s War on Ukraine

Did the US inadvertently finance Putin’s war on Ukraine with short-sighted, politically motivated, and irrational energy and climate policies? And did those failed policies fuel inflation to the obscene rate of 7.87%? Were the geopolitical consequences and the enormous economic costs of those policies predictable and avoidable? The short answers are yes, yes, and yes. Anyone in the Biden Administration could have “done the math” and seen how rising energy prices would continue to fill Putin’s coffers, funding his military build-up, and contribute to runaway inflation here at home.

The oil and gas industry is the cornerstone of the US economy and will continue to be for years to come. Crude oil and natural gas prices impact not only the price of gas at the pump but virtually everything we buy. Petroleum is an ingredient in all types of consumer goods, which are then transported using ships, planes, trains, and trucks fueled with petroleum products. Natural gas powers over 40% of our electrical grid, heats our homes, and is a substantial component in the cost of manufacturing almost everything.

Crude oil and natural gas prices also impact the economic health and behavior of global adversaries like Russia and China. Russia is one of the top three largest oil and natural gas producers in the world. According to the Russian Ministry of Finance, oil and natural gas export revenues constituted 36% of their total federal revenues in 2021. That amounts to over 9 trillion rubles or $121 billion in 2021 alone. Russia sold 48% of its oil and 72% of its natural gas production to European countries.

By contrast, in 2021, America bought only 1% of Russia’s crude oil and none of their natural gas in 2021. 1% doesn’t sound like much but it does amount to 245 million barrels and over $16 billion in revenue to Russia (@$65/barrel average). But our imports of Russian crude are only a small part of the story.

The real story of how Putin financed his war on Ukraine is about the rapidly rising price of crude oil and natural gas over the past several years. If the market price of oil and natural gas had remained relatively stable, Russia would only have made modest profits on its fossil fuel exports. As prices rose, Putin began making a killing and is using those windfalls to build and maintain his war machine.

Russia’s total cost (excluding taxes) of crude oil production is estimated to be between $32 and $44 per barrel. In 2019, the average price for crude was about $60 per barrel. Assuming a production cost of say $40 per barrel, Russia earned a profit of $20 per barrel. But when the average price reached $100 per barrel, their profits triple to $60 per barrel. For reference, Russia’s baseline oil production rose to 11.5 million barrels per day in 2021 and they exported 4.7 million barrels per day.

This translates to a total of 1.7 billion barrels exported in 2021 alone (4.7 x 365). A reasonable crude oil price of $60 per barrel and a profit of $20 per barrel nets Russia $34 billion per year. When crude is over $100 as it is today, Russia makes $60 a barrel and a whopping $102 billion per year! That’s a $68 billion windfall ($102-$34), simply because the US allowed the market price of crude to become artificially and unnecessarily high.

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Biden Admin Prioritizes Climate Fantasies While Famine Threatens The World

President Joe Biden says he is “working out” how to mitigate global food shortages. But action speaks louder than words — and so does inaction.

Global food supply chain chaos has increased due to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Countries across the globe are scrambling to increase food production. However, America is not one of them, because President Joe Biden would seemingly rather virtue signal about climate change than act on the near-term implications of a global famine.

Ukraine is the breadbasket of Europe, with soil similar to that of the American Midwest. It is one of the largest exporters of wheat and corn in the world. Those exports were a lifeline for millions of people, including many who live in “global crisis zones” and have no reliable agriculture of their own — until now.

The World Food Program warned Ukraine’s supply chain is “falling apart.” Those problems will worsen if Ukrainians cannot plant crops this spring.

On top of this, Putin threatened to restrict food sales from Russia — also one of the world’s largest exporters — to only “friendly” countries. Understanding the impending crisis, the European Commission has opened up conserved agricultural land for cultivation and distributed $550 million to European farmers to increase production.

Last week, I asked the Biden administration to take similar steps by opening “approximately four million acres of high quality farmland” for production that are currently held under the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP).

President Biden refused. As an explanation, his Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told the National Grain and Feed Association that re-opening the farm land would have “a significant and detrimental impact on producers’ efforts to mitigate climate change.”

This is not the first time President Biden placed his environmentalist image above common sense and human life. U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry’s obsession with cutting a Green New Deal with Communist China caused him to overlook slave labor in Xinjiang. Moreover, President Biden refuses to expand domestic energy production because, in the words of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, additional domestic production would be “upending our initiatives to save the planet from the climate crisis.”

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Viral ‘Russian Mobile Crematorium’ Tweet is From an 8-Year-Old YouTube Video

A viral tweet that remains unchecked by “fact checkers” claims to show a Russian-operated ‘mobile crematorium’ in Mariupol, but the image is taken from an 8-year-old YouTube video.

Whoops.

The tweet was posted by news outlet NEXTA, which boasts nearly a million followers on Twitter. The tweet has received over 7,000 retweets and almost 11,000 likes.

“Mobile crematoria in #Mariupol,” states the tweet.

“Mayor of Mariupol Vadim Boychenko said today that #Russian mobile crematoria have started operating in the city.”

“According to him, tens of thousands of people could have died in Mariupol and the cremation, “covering up the traces of crimes”.

Except a simple reverse image search reveals the ‘mobile crematorium’ to be a screenshot from an 8-year-old YouTube video.

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US Officials Admit They’re Literally Just Lying To The Public About Russia

NBC News has a new report out citing multiple anonymous US officials, humorously titled “In a break with the past, U.S. is using intel to fight an info war with Russia, even when the intel isn’t rock solid“.

The officials say the Biden administration has been rapidly pushing out “intelligence” about Russia’s plans in Ukraine that is “low-confidence” or “based more on analysis than hard evidence”, or even just plain false, in order to fight an information war against Putin.

The report says that toward this end the US government has deliberately circulated false or poorly evidenced claims about impending chemical weapons attacks, about Russian plans to orchestrate a false flag attack in the Donbass to justify an invasion, about Putin’s advisors misinforming him, and about Russia seeking arms supplies from China.

It was an attention-grabbing assertion that made headlines around the world: U.S. officials said they had indications suggesting Russia might be preparing to use chemical agents in Ukraine.

 

President Joe Biden later said it publicly. But three U.S. officials told NBC News this week there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine. They said the U.S. released the information to deter Russia from using the banned munitions.

 

It’s one of a string of examples of the Biden administration’s breaking with recent precedent by deploying declassified intelligence as part of an information war against Russia. The administration has done so even when the intelligence wasn’t rock solid, officials said, to keep Russian President Vladimir Putin off balance.

So they lied. They may hold that they lied for a noble reason, but they lied. They knowingly circulated information they had no reason to believe was true, and that lie was amplified by all the most influential media outlets in the western world.

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Washington Post Admits NATO Wants to Prolong War in Ukraine

In an article about the potential for a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia, the Washington Post admits that some within NATO want to prolong the war for as long as possible.

The admission is contained in a piece titled ‘NATO says Ukraine to decide on peace deal with Russia — within limits’.

“Even a Ukrainian vow not to join NATO — a concession that Zelensky has floated publicly — could be a concern to some neighbors. That leads to an awkward reality: For some in NATO, it’s better for the Ukrainians to keep fighting, and dying, than to achieve a peace that comes too early or at too high a cost to Kyiv and the rest of Europe,” states the article.

“There is an unfortunate dilemma. The problem is that if it ends now, there is a kind of time for Russia to regroup, and it will restart, under this or another pretext.”

And there you have it.

Now we know why the NATO-aligned legacy media and journalists are constantly lobbying for an escalation that could spark World War III.

NATO wants the war to continue for as long as possible so Russia can be drained and isolated, while the media is addicted to the clicks and ratings it brings.

The article also reveals how Zelensky wants a “legally binding security guarantees from the United States and others to defend it if it were attacked,” something that is totally delusional.

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