Paul Craig Roberts
[Editor’s note: I have long admired Paul Craig Roberts and regard him as our nation’s leading public intellectual. He observed and anticipated the course of events as early as 5 December 2017. We have further confirmation of the motives for demonizing Putin over Ukraine from Investment Watch Blog:
And I have no doubt that these observations are more accurate and on the mark than anything you are hearing and seeing from the MSM, not only CNN, NBC, ABC, and CBS but Fox News as well, alas!]
Dear Readers: It is December and time for my quarterly call for your support of your site. I do this site for you. I have no ego reasons for the website. In fact, it uses up my retirement years when I could otherwise relax.
From time to time some of you admonish me for describing our plight without providing a solution. Possibly, there is no solution. If there is a solution, it won’t be found until enough Americans arise from insouciance and escape from the Matrix to be concerned. My job is to inform. In my column below, I cite former Defense Secretary William Perry who says, “If we are to prevent this catastrophe, the public must understand what is happening.”
First comes the understanding part. Then the solution part. We are far from sufficient understanding, and we might be prevented from achieving an understanding. When the Clinton regime concentrated 90 percent of the US media in six mega-corporations, it gave the ruling elite control over explanations. The only information diversity that we have is provided via the Internet, and there is plenty of unreliable information on Internet sites. It is a big effort and takes time to learn what sites are trustworthy.
Moreover, the elites are now moving against the Internet. One effort was to create the anonymous PropOrNot site and to use it to brand this one and 200 others “Russian agent/dupe.” But the elites have moved far beyond going after individual sites into controlling the Internet overall. The plan that is unfolding is to destroy “net-neutrality.” If you don’t know what that means, look it up. What they intend to do is to make it difficult to use google to find disapproved articles and sites such as this one. If you do find the sites, they will open very slowly. They will discredit legitimate news sources, such as RT, by branding them “foreign propaganda” and forcing them to register as “foreign agents.” They can intimidate sites and push them in a “mainstream” direction. They can intimidate readers who persist in searching for truthful explanations. Once the ruling elite takes control of the Internet, they will control all expanations.
Most readers think this site should be free provided at my expense. The monetary expense of the site is the least expense. A site such as this one makes me a target. Sites that repost my columns and have comment sections expose me to slander by trolls hired to discredit me as a conspiracy theorist, a Russian agent, an anti-semite, an anti-American, a Reaganite servant of the One Percent. Social media is used for the same purpose.
For someone who could be walking on the beach with a lovely woman or enjoying a week-end on the track in a sports car, serving this site is not an enjoyable use of my remaining time on earth.
So, don’t bring me any complaints. If you can do a better job than I am doing, start your own site. Bring me your support. If you do, the site will continue.
Walking into Armageddon
The orchestrated hostility toward Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea protects the $1,000 billion annual budget of the military/security complex by convincing the American public that the US is threatened by enemies. It also keeps alive Democratic Party hopes that Trump can be removed from office, and it has prevented President Trump from normalizing relations with Russia. I have emphasized for some time that Washington’s gratuitous and aggressive actions against Russia and the constant barrage of false accusations against Russia and its government have convinced Russia that Washington is planning a military attack. There is nothing more reckless and irresponsible than to convince a nuclear superpower that you are preparing an attack on them.
One would think that such irresponsible and reckless behavior would have the citizenry aroused and the media reporting the risk. Yet, there is only silence. It is more important to the media whether NFL players stand for the national anthem and that some male politicians show sexual interest in women in inappropriate ways. Insouciant America is walking into Armageddon.
A few days ago former US Secretary of Defense William J. Perry added his voice to mine and to those of the few who understand the danger. Perry said:
“When the Cold War ended, I believed that we no longer had to take that risk [nuclear annihilation] so I put all my energy into efforts to dismantle the deadly nuclear legacy of the Cold War. During my period as the Secretary of Defense in the 90s, I oversaw the dismantlement of 8,000 nuclear weapons evenly divided between the United States and the former Soviet Union. And I thought then that we were well on our way to putting behind us this deadly existential threat, But that was not to be. Today, inexplicably to me, we’re recreating the geopolitical hostility of the Cold War, and we’re rebuilding the nuclear dangers. … We are doing this without any serious public discussion or any real understanding of the consequences of these actions. We are sleepwalking into a new Cold War, and there’s very real danger that we will blunder into a nuclear war. If we are to prevent this catastrophe, the public must understand what is happening.”
How can the American public understand when they do not know, because the few voices telling them are not reported. Indeed, the military/security complex, the Israel Lobby and the lobby’s American agents among the neoconservatives are actively working to discredit those who are aware of the dangerous situation.
The power of the military/security complex and the Israel Lobby, the two prime war-mongers of the 21st century, have immobilized the President of the United States. Trump is helpless in the face of a special prosecutor who is “investigating Russiagate,” a hoax created for the express purpose of preventing President Trump from restoring normal relations with a nuclear superpower.
Experts including William Binney, who developed the universal spy program for NSA thinking mistakenly that it would not be used against American citizens, have stated publicly that, if Russiagate were real and not an orchestrated hoax, the NSA would have all the evidence, making special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s “investigation” completely pointless.
One would think that even those who comprise the presstitute media would be able to figure out that NSA has the evidence if it exists. Instead, the presstitutes cooperate with Mueller in creating a fake news story, one that has been kept alive for over a year.
A country in which the media lack integrity cannot be a democracy as the people have no accurate information with which to make decisions and hold government accountable. The American presstitute media functions as a control arm for the powerful vested interests that are turning the United States into a police state that serves only a few hundredths of One Percent.
Americans have been lied to about everything. I agree that the lies go back a long way. To keep this column to a readable length, we can start with the many lies of the Clinton regime. The war on Serbia was done in order to humiliate Russia by proving that Russia was helpless in the face of American might to come to the aid of its ally, and it was done to establish the use of NATO as an arm of, and cover for, US military aggression.
Then we come to 9/11, the official explanation of which is rejected not only by Osama bin Laden but also by every expert unafraid to open his/her mouth.
Then we have the fake reason for the US invasion of Afghanistan, a disaster for America as it was for the Soviets. A handful of lightly armed Afghans defeated “the world’s only superpower,” just as they defeated the powerful Soviet army.
Then we have the fake charges of Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” hyped to the heavens by the corrupt American presstitutes. This amazing lie, disavowed by the UN weapons inspectors, was used despite the evidence to the contrary to invade Iraq and to destroy a country. This lie was later repudiated by US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who regretted the stain on his reputation caused by the George W. Bush/Dick Chaney regime’s misuse of his credibility before the UN.
Then we have the fake charges against Libya’s Gaddafi that were used to murder Gadaffi, to Hillary’s great delight, and to destroy the most successful country in Africa.
The ISIS mercenaries that Hillary and Obama used to destroy Libya were sent to destroy Syria when Russia and the British Parliament blocked Obama’s plan to send American troops to invade Syria. We have been subjected to years of lies from Washington and the presstitutes that Washington is fighting ISIS, when Washington sent ISIS to Syria to destroy Assad and the Syrian government.
And there is Somalia, another packet of Washington/presstitute lies. And the violation of Pakistan with the bombing of tribal areas falsely claimed to be al-Qaeda or Taliban supporters.
And there is Yemen devastated by Washington’s puppet Saudi Arabia.
And there are the false news reports of “Iranian nukes” and Iranian belligerent actions against Israel.
And “Russia invaded Ukraine” when in fact Washington overthrew with its financed NGOs the democratically elected Ukrainian government.
And now we hear that those who dare to tell the truth to Americans are “Russian agents” and “fake news purveyors.”
When a country’s government and media do nothing but lie 24/7, how can democracy exist. Clearly, it cannot.
Environmental organizations are reporting that President Trump intends to abolish two national monuments by executive order in order to open protected lands to rape, ravage, and ruin by corporations. The two national monuments are Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.
If Trump has the power to turn national monuments over to corporate campaign donors, he most certainly can have his Attorney General open an investigation of Hillary Clinton or even indict her on the already known evidence. He can issue a pre-emptive pardon of General Flynn, who is being framed on charges that do not relate to Russian influence in the presidential election. Indeed, he can have the Attorney General investigate or arrest Mueller for sedition and an attempt to overthrow the government of the United States. These charges are far more realistic than the charge Mueller has brought against Flynn.
But what does President Trump do? He twitters, complaining that Gen. Flynns life is being destroyed while “Crooked Hillary Clinton” walks around free.
Trump is correct, so why doesn’t he do something about it? What Flynn did was to ask the Russians not to over-react to the new sanctions that Obama placed on Russia in an effort to create such bad relations between the US and Russia that Trump would be unable to normalize them. What Flynn did was entirely appropriate and has nothing to do with the hoax story of Russiagate. The real reason that the military/security complex is after Gen. Flynn is that he is the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and he said on a TV news show that the decision by the Obama regime to send ISIS to overthrow Syria was a “willful decision” that went against his recommendation.
In other words, Flynn let the cat out of the bag that ISIS was not an independently formed organization but a tool of US policy.
The presstitutes, of course, ignored Gen. Flynn’s statement. The only effect of Flynn’s statement was to set him up for retaliation, and that is what Mueller is doing.
What Mueller is doing is so corrupt that he really should be arrested and renditioned to Egypt.
Private interests and agendas have control over the US government.The people have no control. Washington works by selling legislation to the interest groups in exchange for campaign contributions. The private interests that provide the money that elects politicians get the laws that they want. For example, President Trump is giving the environmental despoilers two protected national monuments, but he is powerless to protect himself and has advisers.
The ruling oligarchy is making an example of Trump in order to ensure that no future presidential candidate makes a direct appeal to the people. When Trump said that he was going to govern in the interest of the people by bringing the offshored jobs home, he attacked the profits of the global corporations, and when he said he was going to normalize relations with Russia, he attacked the power and profit of the military/security complex. He is now paying the price for his rashness.
The larger question is: what price will the American people and the rest of the world pay for the constraints the military/security complex has placed on Trump’s ability to normalize relations with Russia?
I did not know where to place this info re electric cars, so I figured I may as well bring some more attention to PCR’s post even though it’s not related. A friend sent me this in an email, so I have no idea who wrote it, but it’s the best case against all electric cars I have found.
EV Batteries
I’m not sure the exact ORIGIN of this article, but it does make good sense from someone who knows a lot more than I do about batteries and how they are made.
Interesting Read!
Subject: going green
What is a battery? Nicholas Tesla said it best when he called it an Energy Storage System. That’s an important distinction.
Batteries do not make electricity – they store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fueled generators. So, to say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid.
Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered, do you see?
Einstein’s formula, E=MC2, tells us it takes the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The only question again is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.
There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single-use. The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals.
Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium. The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries be recycled. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them.
All batteries are self-discharging. That means even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. You have likely ruined a flashlight or two from an old, ruptured battery. When a battery runs down and can no longer power a toy or light, you think of it as dead; well, it is not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity. As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery’s metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze in your ruined flashlight is toxic, and so is the ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.
In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about those is, ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle single-use ones properly.
But that is not half of it. For those of you excited about electric cars and a green revolution, I want you to take a closer look at batteries and also windmills and solar panels. These three technologies share what we call environmentally destructive embedded costs.
Everything manufactured has two costs associated with it, embedded costs and operating costs. I will explain embedded costs using a can of baked beans as my subject.
In this scenario, baked beans are on sale, so you jump in your car and head for the grocery store. Sure enough, there they are on the shelf for $1.75 a can. As you head to the checkout, you begin to think about the embedded costs in the can of beans.
The first cost is the diesel fuel the farmer used to plow the field, till the ground, harvest the beans, and transport them to the food processor. Not only is his diesel fuel an embedded cost, so are the costs to build the tractors, combines, and trucks. In addition, the farmer might use a nitrogen fertilizer made from natural gas.
Next is the energy costs of cooking the beans, heating the building, transporting the workers, and paying for the vast amounts of electricity used to run the plant. The steel can holding the beans is also an embedded cost. Making the steel can requires mining taconite, shipping it by boat, extracting the iron, placing it in a coal-fired blast furnace, and adding carbon. Then it’s back on another truck to take the beans to the grocery store. Finally, add in the cost of the gasoline for your car.
A typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, about the size of a travel trunk. It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.
It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for just one battery.”
Sixty-eight percent of the world’s cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls, and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material. Should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the cost of driving an electric car?”
I’d like to leave you with these thoughts. California is building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the ultimate in being ‘green,’ but it is not! This construction project is creating an environmental disaster. Let me tell you why.
The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium- diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicone dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled.
Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades. Sadly, both solar arrays and windmills kill birds, bats, sea life, and migratory insects.
There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions. I predict EVs and windmills will be abandoned once the embedded environmental costs of making and replacing them become apparent. “Going Green” may sound like the Utopian ideal and are easily espoused, catchy buzzwords, but when you look at the hidden and embedded costs realistically with an open mind, you can see that Going Green is more destructive to the Earth’s environment than meets the eye, for sure.
If this had been titled : “The Embedded Costs of Going Green,” would you have read it? Please share if you wish.
So, on a more personal note, I drive an 18 year old Prius. It’s a hybrid. I’m approaching 200,000 miles and have yet to replace the main battery. They can normally only be replaced by a dealer, as my regular mechanic has told me it needs a special piece of equipment that would cost him $10K. ..not worth it to him. I still get 50 mpg. There are maintenance jobs on a Prius that can only be done correctly by a dealer. The last break job cost me 3800 bucks because no one else would work on it. They are better around town, as that’s when the electric motor kicks in….at stops and such. Since I don’t drive that much, I would rather have an old pickup…like a 76 Dodge slant six I used to have where you could literally sit in the engine compartment.
Attachment
Paul Craig Roberts is important to the Truther community because he is a knowledgeable and high-ranking former government official who turned against the “dark side”. This article, however, seems a little strange in that parts of it seem current and others seem to have been written while Trump was still in office.
The mention of William Perry points to his role as a rather balanced, sane, secretary of defense. It’s good that he is now questioning the elites’ narrative, but he needs to speak up louder–time is running out.