Exit Strategy

Part of the horrible tragedy that we unleashed on Iraq stemmed from the lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. While another part of that horrible tragedy stemmed from the fact that when our leaders began the conflict, they had no realistic exit strategy.

As the corporate media keeps pushing the narrative that the escalation of the Ukrainian conflict is the only possible path forward, I pray that everyone is paying close attention to what our leaders are stating the “exit strategy” is this time around.

So what are our leaders saying is our exit strategy in this conflict with Russia?

Anyone? 

I want to build on an analogy started by Lee Camp: imagine you oversaw a boy egging on his younger brother, who is just a toddler, to yank the family cat’s tail hard over and over. At some point, the cat turns around and gives the toddler a good clawing that he won’t forget. 

As an adult, what do you do? In addition to soothing the toddler, you also need to impress upon the toddler how he needs to stop yanking the cat’s tail. But the biggest thing you need to deal with is the older brother who started the whole mess.

Hold on. That’s us.

I realize that every day it becomes harder and harder to simply admit that Russia has legitimate national security concerns. It becomes harder to admit that we assisted a coup in Ukraine in February 2014. It becomes harder to admit that we have been providing military assistance to a civil war in the Donbass region of Ukraine, right on Russia’s border, for the last 8 years. It becomes harder to admit that we refused to take Ukraine’s membership in NATO off the table. It becomes harder to admit that both the US and NATO have a history of attacking sovereign countries.

It becomes harder to remember such basic wisdom from the movie, The Princess Bride:  “Never get involved in a land war in Asia.”

My favorite quotes of last two weeks:

“The U.S. is f’d because they think windmills are oil. Solar is oil. Gas is oil. Gas is propane. Diesel is gas. And all run through the same pipelines that take up no land corridors and are run by magic elves who live in a money tree.”

- by Dr. D., a regular commenter on The Automatic Earth, on 3/25/2022

“We’ve heard of suicide by cop. This is suicide by WWIII.”

- by Gottlieb, a commenter on Moon of Alabama, on Ukraine Open Thread 3/24/2022

Oh! Maybe that’s our exit strategy. Civilizational suicide by WWIII. The final exit.

I guess that will take care of it.

Take care everyone.

P.S. I tried to keep this blog short this time. But if you're looking for more depth, please see Scott Ritter's March 23rd interview by the Grayzone: Grayzone- Ritter

(Remember, Ritter was the one that told the truth that there was no credible evidence for Iraqi WMD. He deserves a listen.)

One Big Backstory Behind Everything

The modern economy in a nutshell

1) Debts are spiraling out of control everywhere 

2) Modern economies work by servicing debts – paying back investors in full, plus a profit
3) Cheap & Profitable Energy is required to service almost all debts in modern economies
     (Specifically - Energy that is both Cheap to consumers and Profitable to producers)
4) Cheap & Profitable Energy is slowly and inexorably depleting. More and more so every day
5) Debts are spiraling out of control everywhere

Let’s pretend that in your factory, 25 people are responsible for executing one process. You can buy a machine for $5 million that will replace those workers. You don’t have $5 million. So you borrow $5 million to install the machine and fire those workers. You pay back your investors over time with interest (their profit) and you also profit from not having to pay over $1 million every year in employee costs. Your workers lost their livelihoods. But you and your investors profit over time. That’s the modern economy in a nutshell.

The iron ore to make the steel for the machine was mined and transported using Cheap & Profitable Energy (C&PE). The ore was turned into steel using C&PE. The Steel was transported and then made into the Machine using C&PE. The Machine was transported and installed in your factory using C&PE. The Machine runs everyday on C&PE. The products the machine makes are transported to your customers using C&PE. At every step of the way, C&PE is required to service the debt.

We are not running out of energy, per se. We are running out of Cheap & Profitable Energy which is critical for modern economies to function. The lowest hanging fruit has mostly been picked over. This spells conflict.

This is, of course, an overly simplistic account. For more in depth analyses about how critical C&PE is to all modern economies, see Tim Watkin’s Consciousness of Sheep, or Gail Tverbergs’ Our Finite World. Chris Martenson, John Michael Greer, James Howard Kunstler, Richard Heinberg, and a host of others have also been talking about these issues for decades.

The dependence of modern economies on Cheap & Profitable Energy - and its decline as debts simultaneously spiral out of control everywhere - is one big backstory behind everything. Our media, our academic institutions, and indeed our entire culture are failing us by not informing us of this critical backstory.

Food, Fertilizer & Russia

C&PE is also required for producing fertilizers for industrial agriculture, to grow the food most humans eat. Specifically, almost all fertilizers for industrial agriculture are produced using Natural Gas.

Regarding fertilizer, we need to talk about Russia. Some say it has a small economy, no bigger than Spain’s in terms of GDP. However, this only confirms how useless GDP is for understanding geopolitics.

The modern global economy works by undervaluing the most valuable things in life – Energy, Food, Fertilizer, Timber, and Human Labor. This is how we get more things! (In our backwards modern economy). These are much more pivotal than GDP for understanding geopolitics.

What does Russia produce for the global economy on a massive scale? 

You guessed it. Energy, Food, Fertilizer, and Timber. Russia’s input to the global economy only looks small because we have trained ourselves to economically undervalue the most valuable things in life.

For example, Russia produces over 60% of the world’s ammonium nitrate, a primary nitrogen (N) fertilizer. Russia is also a major producer of phosphate (P) and potash (K) fertilizers. NPK are the three primary plant nutrients that make up our food.

No fertilizer. No food. No fertilizer. Famine. 

The Winter Wheat harvest throughout the Northern Hemisphere looks to be very bad this year. Argentina’s Corn harvest looks to be very bad this year. Argentina is the world’s second largest Corn exporter.

Planting time in the Northern Hemisphere for all major crops except next year’s Winter Wheat is during the next few months. Fertilizer and Natural Gas prices are sky high right now. Too high, perhaps, to even justify planting.

Heck, they were already high before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

Russia, Ukraine, and the Corporate Media

Is Corporate Media highlighting that the continuing conflict in Ukraine brings with it the huge potential for food price hikes and/or global famine that are unprecedented in the modern world?

Does corporate media (including NPR) say anything that doesn’t benefit the Military Industrial Complex that Eisenhower so famously warned us about in his last presidential address to the American people (linked here)?

If nothing else, why is Scott Ritter not on the news every night to, at the very least, debate the dominant Military Industrial Complex narrative with all of the numerous Pentagon-appointed talking heads? Who is Scott Ritter? He was the UN's Chief Weapons Inspector during the build up to the Iraq war. He told the truth then that there was no credible evidence for Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. He has a wealth of information and insight into the present Ukrainian tragedy.

I highly recommend watching this interview with Ritter (linked here). He gives some important historical Ukrainian backstory 15 minutes in. He references the Cheap & Profitable Energy cards Russia has yet to play in this conflict 31 minutes in. If nothing else comes from you reading this blogpost, I pray that you find time to listen to the last 8 minutes (from the 31 minute mark until the end). Note how emphatic Ritter is about how important energy is to this conflict. And he's not even delving into fertilizer and its outrageously important role in this conflict.

History has proven that if we had listened to this man 20 years ago, we could have prevented untold tragedies in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. And now corporate media can't give him a hearing?

We need a mainstream news that regularly interviews people like Ritter, instead of just more generals who sit on boards of weapons manufacturers who stand to profit from the escalation of this conflict. We need a mainstream news that informs us of crucial historical information such as the fact that Russia has had a naval base in Crimea for longer than the US has been a country. But don't hold your breath on the corporate media actually informing you of such crucial information.

No amount of low-quality alternative media can justify this state of affairs in our mainstream news - the corporate media. Alex Jones does not justify this state of affairs. On the contrary, I will argue that the abysmal quality of corporate media is what gives rise to so much low-quality alternative media. People are desperate to hear media that simply acknowledges a few things they know to be true. In that justifiable desperation, so much low-quality alternative media is born.

But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. If you are looking for alternative views on what’s happening in Ukraine, you could do a lot worse than the following:

Moon of Alabama,  Automatic Earth,  The Saker,  

Reminiscence of the Future          Gold, Goats 'N Guns

All of these sites reveal many important facts and perspectives not aired in corporate media about the unfolding Ukrainian tragedy.  This isn’t to endorse any or all of their opinions, but simply to highlight perspectives you’re almost guaranteed to miss on corporate media.

May we all choose to understand different views and risk learning something new, versus tacitly supporting censorship of dissenting views. 

Please realize that whatever perspectives you may read on the above linked websites, and whatever view you may have about those perspectives, may very well turn out to be completely irrelevant -  relative to walking blindly into a global thermonuclear war, or having millions upon millions of people starve over the next year or so.

All wars are hell. 

An Exercise in Empathy

Our empathy should, of course, be extended to the citizens of Ukraine in this tragedy.

And as we sit on the edge of WWIII and/or an unprecedented mass starvation event, it would also serve to empathize with our so-called “enemy”.

So let’s turn the tables for a moment with a little thought experiment in which Russia and the US switch roles, and in which Canada takes on the role of Ukraine. I ask here, "What would we have done if we were in Russia's shoes?"

Imagine that in 2014, Canada switched to a Russia-friendly government. This did not happen at the ballot box, but came from an uprising backed by force of arms. Since then, Canada has had a small but very deadly civil war between the new Russia-friendly central government and some Canadian provinces on the US border with American-majority populations. 

Imagine that an Agreement was reached between the US and Canada to end the Civil War in the American-majority provinces, an agreement in which Canada agreed to officially recognize the independence of those provinces. But then Canada never officially recognized their independence, but instead continued the war against the American-majority provinces, right on the US border.

Imagine that there was increasing talk during the last 8 years that Canada was going to officially join a Russia-centric international military alliance. Regardless of the talk, Canada indeed received substantial military training and weaponry directly from Russia and their military alliance throughout.

Imagine that during the last 8 years, US presidents had used every opportunity to announce to the world that they would not tolerate Canada joining the Russia-centric international military alliance, that Russian weapon sales to Canada must stop, and that the civil war must end and the American-majority provinces be recognized as independent.

Imagine that all diplomatic efforts to stop the deadly civil war against the Americans living in Canada had failed. All diplomatic efforts to stop Russia’s flow of arms into Canada had failed. All diplomatic efforts to get Canada to agree to not join the Russian military alliance had failed. And to the contrary, Canada kept openly requesting to join Russia’s military alliance, which Russia openly supported.

Imagine on top of all of the above, that on February 19th, 2022, the Canadian Prime Minister gave a speech at an international security conference saying that, in effect, Russia-friendly Canada was considering pursuing the development of nuclear weapons.

What would the US do in such a situation? Answer honestly.

I personally have not been able to figure out how the US would effectively stop such a provocation without the use of force, if we stood in the same shoes as Russia did throughout the last 8 years.

Likewise, I have not yet heard anyone explain how Russia was supposed to have effectively stopped such a provocation without the use of force. 

I am open to someone explaining that clearly.

There is no shame in recognizing that Russia, a country that was invaded by and then repelled both Napoleon's Grand Army and Hitler's Wehrmacht, has legitimate national security concerns. 

That recognition, by no means, requires ignoring any of Russia’s past or present atrocities. It simply admits that a country we are inclined to now view as an “Enemy” does indeed have legitimate concerns. And that the horribly tragic situation on the ground would be dramatically improved by acknowledging those legitimate concerns. More than likely it's the single most effective thing we can do to keep from escalating this horrible tragedy into an even worse one.

“Biological Research Facilities”

You probably have seen by now the infamous clip of the Senate conversation between Senator Rubio and Victoria Nuland? (Nuland was the US representative on-the-ground during the Ukrainian 2014 Maidan Revolution)

There has been an incredible amount of digital ink spilled over this conversation already, but I feel like the key question here keeps getting obscured in all of the hub-bub online. So let’s highlight that again.

Nuland stated unequivocally that Ukraine has “Biological Research Facilities” which “we are now concerned that Russian forces may gain control of”. 

It is deeply fascinating to watch Rubio and Nuland walk the tightrope of dismissing “Russian propaganda” about how Russia “has uncovered a plot by the Ukrainians to release biological weapons in the country with NATO’s coordination” while simultaneously openly acknowledging that, indeed, Ukraine did have “Biological Research Facilities” that are of serious concern if they fall into Russian hands.

This is the key question: Why would there be any “concern” if these “facilities” were only conducting “biological research”? Such “concern” only makes sense if there was some dangerous offensive-in-nature, bio-warfare, or gain-of-function research going on. 

If all that was being researched was simply defensive in nature, let’s say, then wouldn’t it be the same as what every regional country was also researching? Then Russia wouldn’t be coming across anything they didn’t already have in their own labs, and would know perfectly well how to deal with it. 

Do people think that Russia doesn’t also have its own biological labs researching dangerous pathogens in their region? That they don’t already have samples of every potential biologic concern in the region, and know perfectly well how to deal with them? Really? This is the country whose rockets transport US astronauts to and from the International Space Station. 

I hope you see what I’m getting at. My central worry isn’t just that there are numerous Pentagon funded “biological research facilities” in the Ukraine, per se. It’s certainly possible that all of this could very well be benign and/or beneficial. My central worry is that Nuland has a “concern” that the research material in those labs might fall into enemy hands.

What is in those Pentagon-funded labs that’s so dangerous that it causes such “concern”?

I certainly don’t know. I sure hope someone at the UN Security Council with access to actual evidence can get to the bottom of this, as they are now reviewing the matter. If Russia is lying out their teeth, well then this is their “Iraq has Weapons of Mass Destruction” moment.

If, and this is a HUGE “IF”, it turns out that the Pentagon helped to conduct gain-of-function research in those Ukrainian labs, as Anthony Fauci’s NAIAD, with grants funneled through Peter Daszak’s Eco-Health Alliance, helped fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan labs, all of which happened during a time when the US had placed a moratorium on all gain-of-function research - well, any shred of credibility that the US still has on the world stage will be destroyed for the foreseeable future. I’m not even sure any psy-ops by corporate media and/or WWIII could keep the lid on that one. 

We Americans need to acknowledge that this “evidence” for “bio-weapons labs” on Russia’s borders, as vague, murky and questionable as it all is, is at least as good as any of the “evidence” the US presented the UN Security Council in 2003 to justify our invasion of Iraq. May we therefore refrain from getting on a moral high horse, potentially hindering any real resolutions, especially when so much is at stake.

How to Stop the War in Ukraine

I support Ukraine by suggesting that they end this conflict by simply agreeing to Russia’s demands, that Ukraine:

1) Amends their constitution to prohibit them from ever joining NATO
2) Officially recognizes Crimea as part of Russia
3) Officially recognizes Luhansk and Donetsk as independent

If Russia would still except these terms, I do believe this would be best for Ukraine and for the world.

What exactly makes these demands non-negotiable? This war would be over if they were agreed to.

What, or who exactly prevented Ukraine from agreeing to these demands BEFORE the Russian Invasion? The Russian invasion would very likely not have happened if they were agreed to.

What, or who exactly prevents Ukraine from agreeing to these demands right now?

As we are pondering these questions, may we keep in mind that regardless of what happens, as world events increasingly go haywire, we need to remember two crucial things:

1) That there is a big backstory behind everything - debts are spiraling out of control simultaneously with Cheap & Profitable Energy depleting. We only scratched the surface here in this post of how relevant this backstory is to the unfolding Ukrainian tragedy. Let alone how relevant it is to so many other tragedies washing ashore.

2) That corporate media cannot be trusted to give the full story. 

The future will likely not make any sense without keeping these both in mind.

My Favorite Quotes about the Ukrainian Tragedy

I’ll finish by sharing my two favorite quotes since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. One came from commenter “Black Cloud” on an article the Saker published on March 3rd, 2022:

“The Russians are playing chess. The West is playing with itself.”  

I’m not convinced of the first part of that quote. The second part appears pretty solid though. 

The second quote is from Caitlin Johnstone:

“It’s 2022, and people still believe that the US is pouring weapons into a foreign country to protect freedom and democracy. That’s like being 57 and still believing in the Tooth Fairy.”