The Race that Apparently Wasn’t Won: the US is Taking the Cold War Off Ice

After a fifty-year arm-race that was filled with battles and insurgencies filled via proxy there inevitably could only be one winner. That was the country who held the world’s reserve currency. As the US continued to flex its muscles throughout the world and especially in the oil rich middle east after the Soviet collapse, something started to change.

Russia recovered sooner than we anticipated. They wanted their seat at the table back. It now appears the US has only a table for one. 

“WE COULD DO WITH HAVING A USIA ON STEROIDS TO FIGHT THIS INFORMATION WAR [WITH RUSSIA] A LOT MORE AGGRESSIVELY THAN WE’RE DOING RIGHT NOW,”

Those were the words from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper as he sat before the members of the Senate Armed Services Committee last week and had the courage that so many other have been lacking and finally tell the truth.

To finally place the blame on who’s responsible for our breach of security and confidence in elections. Someone finally nailed it and highlighted our lack of manpower and resources to fend off the evil Ruskies, led by Vladimir the Impaler (Putin).

The man, if you can call him such, who ghoulishly rubs his hands in a heated frenzy at the idea of our destruction, like the bloodthirsty- cannibal – commie he is, hell bent on the destabilization of the entire west.

That’s the script anyway, right? Weird how that works. It’s a strange time we live in. A time where the government decides what questions to ask and just who to ask them to. It’s not new of course but it doesn’t make it any easier to swallow.

The audacity of Mr. Clapper is astonishing. First of all, for us, as Americans to collectively point the finger at another country for meddling and sabotage is laughable if it wasn’t so reprehensible and unequivocally ironic. Sadly, so much of our geopolitical makeup and stances are just this.

• Ban other countries, sovereign states from nuclear programs; while we enhance or polish our own.
• Publicly demand other nations to stop escalating proxy wars of aggression or support hostile nations or terror groups while we conduct and support our own of our choosing
• Rail at other nations (and this is my favorite) to stop their currency manipulation while we fund the largest theft of wealth the world has ever seen 100 x’s over via the petrodollar fiat monopoly scheme
• Condemn the justice or lack thereof of other nations why we operate black sites across the globe without oversight or even public record or knowledge

I could go on. And on. And on. But for the sake of clarity, structure and respect for a sensible word count – let’s get to the point. We demand another country to pay the piper for infiltrating our election while we run the largest covert and clandestine operations of anyone in the world on friends and foes alike.

Disrupt elections. Support coups. Assassinate or help aide the assassination of democratically elected leaders. Let’s say for the sake of the argument that Russia did do what they are accused of. Then I say… so what?

Business as usual. Par for the course. When in Rome… you get the idea. Russia wouldn’t have done anything we haven’t done or will continue to do to our enemies and allies alike on a year – year, day to day & minute by minute basis.

EVEN if this was true what would have happened?  They would never have changed a vote. All they would have done was expose the dirty laundry of the DNC and its quarterback, one Hillary Clinton. And that would have been the point. She was itching for a war with Russia. And has been pushing so for years at her time as Secretary of State. She made it perfectly clear to the US populace during the debates:

“I’M GOING TO CONTINUE TO PUSH FOR A NO-FLY ZONE AND SAFE HAVENS WITHIN SYRIA, NOT ONLY TO HELP PROTECT THE SYRIANS AND PREVENT THE CONSTANT OUTFLOW OF REFUGEES BUT TO, FRANKLY, GAIN SOME LEVERAGE ON BOTH THE SYRIAN GOVERNMENT AND THE RUSSIANS.”

A no-fly zone initiated over another sovereign nation that you never declared war on? Where have we seen this before? Seems legitimate.

I have the direct opposite take from that of our intelligence community. One that is quite simply this, knowing what we know about Mrs Clinton if Russia didn’t intervene in some capacity to influence the election

I would assume they were either severely incompetent or awaiting a mutual destruction endgame. Why would they want a presidential candidate who is openly hostile to their standing in the world, in power of the most deadly armed forces the globe has ever seen? So, whether they hacked the emails is of insignificance to me.

Staying with this alternate reality (like the one our intelligence community and administration likes to play ie a reality without evidence) if there was any hacking shouldn’t the onus fall on the DNC? For being quite frankly, lazy, incompetent and just unappealable to the undecided voter? Seems plausible enough.

I mean it’s THEIR security that was hacked after all. If not the bumbling DNC, then who? You can’t blame another nation for doing what we (and every other nation mind you) do on a day to day basis and that is mine for data to use to said nation(s) advantage.

So then, I turn my attention to the real culprit here and that lies at the feet of our national security. Because no matter what; shouldn’t the role of national security involve ummm…. SECURITY? And if the security is breached shouldn’t we look at our security in place or lack thereof?

• As of last year, we had over 100k people working on our behalf in the US intelligence community.
• Just two years ago taxpayers funded and completed the NSA’s Data Center, the 1.5 billion dollar/1 million square foot facility in Utah whose sole purpose is spying and data collection.
• In 2003 we see the creation of Homeland Security whose budget often lies anywhere in the 40-80 billion dollar range annually.
• Let us not forget about the FBI and of course, where would we be without the CIA and its black budget. A virtual blank check from the Department of Defense for the Central Intelligence Agency and its brother and sister agencies working in the intelligence community. A budget which has been reported to be in the 50 billion dollar range

That seems like quite the defense. It would seem we have all we need to stop or thwart any mass scale, state-sponsored hacking program. Yet, James Clapper is asking for more? An INCREASE? That begs the question, could our national security really be incompetent? And this is where things go off the rails in opposite directions.

It would seem, a regional strategy to support the mujahideen in Afghanistan to defeat Russia was an end justify the means approach despite the blowback that occurred with Al Qaeda and subsequently 9-11. An unforeseen error I would surmise.

What about a strategy that has seen us embrace regime change in Iraq. A nation that was secular in an Islamic theocracy dominated middle east? To then promote nation building then abandon said nation while creating vacuums that foster groups like ISIS? Do those ends justify the means too? Was Iraq such a threat?

Or what about Libya? We participated in air support and a no-fly zone (ah there it is) in the overthrow and the removal of another secular leader in Gaddafi who grew Libya into the richest nation on the continent of Africa. To only see it fall into the hands of rebels and a climate of total deprivation and chaos.

How about secular Syria who has seen us wave the sword at for decades? Always right there to punish them by sanctions and or by proxy as the US backs the same terrorist ties that the US pinned 9-11 on. Does this seem like a sound strategy?

And then there is Iran.

If radicalization and theocracies don’t share our values then why are our intelligence community and the nation following a script that has us doing the exact opposite shaping our geopolitical landscape? That leads to only one logical answer because that is the objective. We want to destabilize the region.

We want to protect the petrodollar hegemony (as Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya have all left or tried to leave the US dollar as a reserve currency). We want to control the energy in the region via pipeline deals and the players who sit in an area where ⅔’s of the world’s oil supply is derived from. All of these are true. All of these are objectives.

If Russia infiltrated the election to merely expose the neocons and hawks of the left (Clinton) they do so at the behest of the entire free world. The world that would rather not end.

So the witch hunt that’s taking place regarding Russia via our intelligence community and our mainstream “media” is the US trying to reshape the narrative. A narrative where they are back trying to dupe the public into another hail mary from the cold war playbook. However, the cold war has ended and we have the internets. We won’t be fooled again.

The chequeing scheme, where micro meets macro

This is about as a rounded and admittedly loose connection as one can make but a connection nonetheless. Let me get straight to the back story.

My lady friend of 18 years & counting refuses to use a debit card. She despises credit. She also prefers to not use cash either. She's still the mindset of 20 years ago when everything revolves around cheques. Now, in her defense there is a practical reason behind it. She feels if you really want to buy something that added step of writing it out reduces impulse buying and judging by her sterling accounting of our finances; I offer no debate.

A few weeks ago she unexpectedly ran out of cheques. Unfortunately this coincided with the long Martin Luther King Day weekend thus the banks were closed. So with no ability to access her money, she had two choices: use credit or dont buy what she needed until the next day. As we were just one day from our annual winter getaway to Florida... I enter with option three: me picking up the tab. And being the loving spouse I am, I chose to use my cheques. One part out of respect for her and partly because I just haven't written one in so long. At the same time, I felt it would make it an interesting exercise to practice my cursive. 

So a few transactions and a few chicken scratches later, we were on our way. When we got back home is when it got interesting. It seems due to inactivity and I moving my direct deposit out of that bank, my account was closed. Unbeknownst to me, I had written three cheques without having an account at all. I quickly made contact with the vendors and paid in cash the amount + fees. This suddenly made me remember why I stopped using cheques over a decade ago: overdrafts.

Now at this point It was behind us. One week later came the letters from collection agencies demanding the funds to cover said cheques. So, I called to explain to them the situation. A manager on duty of the collection service then hit me with this...

"Sir, if you dont have proof you made good on these cheques we require a payment to take care of that. We except two forms of payment. Western Union and Cheque by phone."

Cheque by phone, I asked? I told her I wrote a bad cheque, why would they accept another cheque? She then begins to tell me it happens all the time. That people knowingly write bad cheques and then make payments to the collection agencies with more bad cheques. If this process seems completely irrational and made up; its only the same exact thing that our government does (and gets away with) regarding the dollar.

Now I did say it was a loose connection and you made it this far so bare with me.

We effectively print dollars with no tangible backing whatsoever, just "confidence" that the dollar will not crash and that in turn will not lead to a run on the bank. Remember, due to the modern practice of fractional reserve banking, bank's tend to only keep a small fraction in liquid reserves. Thus any major fluctuation of withdrawals in a one day period can make things very interesting for a bank.

Now with that said, after the banks make these monopoly based dollars, they just sit back and operate the biggest shakedown modern civilization has ever seen.

By way of OPEC taking only US dollars for its oil (thank you President Nixon and King Faisal), it forces oil buying nations (read the entire world) to naturally obtain US dollars so they can obtain the OPEC oil (which holds about 2/3 of the worlds oil supply). OPEC then takes those US dollars and reinvests them into US banks further strengthening our place as the preferred empire of the world over.

So, like a guy armed with a closed chequing account and a fistful of cheques, you too can play the game of tangible assets/commodities for nothing too. Buy the goods and services with cheques that, like our dollar, are essentially worthless paper backed by nothing; THEN use the same cheques to pay off the creditors! You come out with goods and everyone else is stuck holding worthless paper. Then rinse & repeat.

The difference between the guy running that scheme with a closed chequing account is eventually the jig will be up. Unless you’re real slippery and willing to constantly move and change your name quite often; it will all come to an end. But what about the US petrol-dollar scheme? How long before that hustle is over? When you think about it, from the US point of view, it’s paramount that the US remains the reserve currency for oil. For if not, we can expect a lot of dollars coming back home and when I say a lot, I am talking the SHIT-TON of quantities.

If that happens our standard of living (even at a declining rate) will all but disappear. This will create instant hyperinflation and eventually a sell-off so large that the immigration issues on the borders wont be commonly known from Mexican people trying to get as they are today but instead it will be American citizens trying to get out.

Its pretty obvious the lengths our leaders will go to keep this asset bubble propped up. So, what happens if you don't agree with this petrodollar recycling scheme? What if you are in favor of, say a more "open competition" regarding how to pay for oil? As I stated last year in this piece; it usually doesn’t end well for you.

Now with Iraq and Afghanistan wrapping up, all the sabers are waving towards Iran and they are running out of time. Friday, President Obama put them on notice Friday saying:

"Right now, we think it would take over a year or so for Iran to actually develop a nuclear weapon"

Then eloquently added:  "but obviously we don’t want to cut it too close.”

The President then went on to call a nuclear Iran "a red line". You have less than a year Iran. Less then a year before you continue or end your nuclear program. But remember, the nuclear program is a guise. The real threat remains the precedent you are making with disrespect for the dollar. So, close your oil bourse and fall back in line or else.

Now picture that guy again with the cheques and the false chequing account. Hes cashing cheques and receiving goods and when you want to collect or end the scheme he shows up at your place of business with an army and guns and tells you if you dont change your ad's or paint your store Tropicana yellow hes gonna shoot the place up and remove you. You like your job dont you? Your kids eat waffles dont they? You need money to buy waffles. The American hegemony alive and well; Tony Soprano don’t have nothin’ on us.