patrick.net

https://sukwan.substack.com/p/friday-funnies-b7c

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/the-baddies-saturday-july-13-2024

Meanwhile, the rest of the world shocked geopolitical experts by responding to cratering U.S. leadership in entirely predictable ways. Bloomberg ran an irksome story Thursday headlined, “Modi’s Embrace of Putin Irks Biden Team Pushing Support for Kyiv.”



What irked, peeved, riled, and disgruntled Biden’s war planners was a photo destined to become one of those iconic pre-war images, like that happy sailor kissing a buxom nurse in Times Square after World War II. In this week’s photo, recently re-elected Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi looked happy and relieved while getting, not a kiss, but a full bear hug from the Russian Bear. In Moscow. Whew, Modi seemed to be thinking, I almost took a trip on the Hinden-Biden!

It looks like he doesn’t want to let go.

Now, as you know, I hate to criticize. But is “irked” a sufficiently strong sensation for Biden’s State Department to feel as one of the largest U.S. allies turns its back on us and embraces the RussoChinese axis? Are those State Department morons paying attention to current events? ...

China, historically unfriendly to Russia in the pre-Broccoli period, but now Russia’s closest ally, has 1.5 billion citizens. It sure looks like Biden’s neocon war experts have, through shrewd tactics and cunning strategeries, mostly by putting a guy in charge who calls the other NATO leaders “President Putin” by mistake, managed to create a Russia-India-China coalition accounting for nearly half the world’s population.

That’s a big army. But don’t worry. NATO’s arsenal of high-tech wonder weapons include more than just TikTok influencers. NATO generals, and I am not making this up, have announced record-shattering plans to someday build fabulously expensive hellscape swarms of AI drones that are infinitely more complicated and do less damage than cheap, dumb artillery shells, in which the Russians are swimming.

But listen. This is the main point. The AI drones will be built by transexual midgets with no fewer than three mixed minority parents. Check, check, check, check.

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/sanctuarianism-wednesday-august-21

Two can play at the sanctuary state game. Late last week, President Putin issued a decree making Russia into a sanctuary country for people with traditional Christian values. You cannot make this stuff up; it could only happen in 2024.

In short, Putin’s decree waived certain Russian immigration requirements, such as demonstrating Russian language proficiency and passing a history test, for people applying for temporary residence permits. Applicants must come from countries “imposing destructive neoliberal ideological guidelines that contradict traditional Russian spiritual and moral values.”

Traditional Russian spiritual and moral values are anti-LGBTQ+, orthodox Christian values.

Even more entertaining, Putin ordered the Russian government to compile a list of approved countries with “destructive neoliberal values.”

Who wants to bet the United States appears prominently at the top of that list?

In classic Putin fashion, the move was not just virtue signaling. The overheated Russian economy is thirsty for skilled workers. The category of only ‘neoliberal’ countries ensures temporary workers will come from preferred, higher-income areas. The ideological character of the test causes applicants to self-select for conservatism; liberals won’t bother applying.

I wish we could do the same thing for Florida residency.

Putin has thrown down the bearskin glove and challenged the West to vote with their feet. As for me, I plan to stay and fight to the bitter end. How about you?

Lol, the "sanctions" resulted in Russian self-reliance and a booming economy in Russia.

I have to admit that this decree is a brilliant move politically, but I'm not about to give up on America or to trust Russia yet. The Russian psychology is still mired in cynical corruption, justified by the idea that "everyone does it". And they also had death jab mandates, a different kind of corruption, far more dangerous.

The first country to publicly hang everyone who mandated the death jabs will get my vote for most honorable country on earth.

https://www.rt.com/news/603014-usmanov-interview-sanctions-backfired/

Western sanctions against Russia have yielded results that are the opposite of their stated goal, metals tycoon Alisher Usmanov has said.

In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera on Thursday, the Russian billionaire argued that the sanctions regime has so far done more harm to the European Union countries than to Russia.

“They wanted to harm the Russian economy, and here it is growing. They wanted to punish the business elite, and the Russians brought the money back home. The Russian economy is adapting to the sanctions, while neighboring markets are suffering. Europe rejects Russian energy resources and is forced to buy them at a much higher price,” he told the publication.

EU ‘part of the conflict’ in Ukraine – BorrellEU ‘part of the conflict’ in Ukraine – BorrellREAD MORE: EU ‘part of the conflict’ in Ukraine – Borrell
Russia’s economy expanded 3.6% in 2023 despite the economic sanctions imposed by the EU, the US and their allies since the start of the special operation in Ukraine in 2022. The EU’s economic powerhouse Germany went through a recession last year, while the bloc’s other large economies, France and Italy, posted growth of under 1%.

Following the sanctions and the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline in September 2022 that led to a dramatic drop in Russia’s gas supplies to the EU, the bloc started buying liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the US. According to estimates published by Russia's Energy Ministry, American LNG is 30-40% more expensive than Russian pipeline gas.

Patrick says

Russia’s economy expanded 3.6% in 2023 despite the economic sanctions imposed by the EU, the US and their allies since the start of the special operation in Ukraine in 2022.

Just like we adjusted the jobs report 800k here. All countries lie about their economics. I don't believe any of it. I go by what I see. 99.9% of Americans won't go to Russia, so they can't see it with their own eyes.

i literally don’t understand how did swamp elites got so many americans to care and hate russia out of nowhere. them 2 minutes hate rituals must have worked. monday we were thinking about work week, tuesday america transitioned into Russia hate. some like that.

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/historic-wednesday-october-23-2024

If one thing has remained constant in the ever-shifting propaganda landscape of the Proxy War, beyond its kaleidoscopic narratives and chameleonic claims, it is the ever-present background refrain sung by the mockingbird media chorus that “Putin’s aggression has made Russia increasingly isolated.” I could show you at least a hundred headlines parroting that phrase, “increasingly isolated.” But if Russia gets any more isolated, Putin will be living in downtown Manhattan.

Yesterday, corporate media ran scads of quiet but unavoidable stories about what is surely one of the most, if not the most historic political meeting in our lifetimes. The New York Times’ article was originally headlined, “Putin Welcomes Xi and Other World Leaders to Russia for BRICS Summit.”

In a telling sign of how terrified the deep state blob is about this meeting, the Times stealth-edited its original headline, to smear Putin and to remove any reference to the BRICS. It now reads, “Seeking to Elude Sanctions, Putin and Xi Promise ‘A Just World Order.’” ...

Even the Times seems to recognize that the “increasingly isolated” canard is wearing thin. Consider this remarkable paragraph, wedged late in the story, rife with admissions of the failures both of Western sanctions and anti-Russia Proxy War propaganda:

"For Russia to have 22 leaders and representatives of over 30
countries coming to Kazan two and a half years into this war does
not only show that Putin is not isolated internationally and the
I.C.C. warrant is of limited utility, but also that the war in Ukraine
has become a new normal, something accepted as a feature of
international reality," said Hanna Notte of the James Martin Center
for Nonproliferation Studies in California."

... Ignoring BRICS is what got us here, morons. To be fair, they aren’t ignoring BRICS. Biden’s out-of-control neocons are deploying their entire bag of dirty tricks against the BRICS nations, including blowing up undersea pipelines, creating colorful color revolutions, and funding endless Proxy Wars. Biden’s neocons want us to ignore the BRICS, so we don’t realize that Biden is crashing the American dollar faster than that F-35 the Air Force lost over South Carolina. ...

What else can you call this except failure? How many billions were wasted, with that lackwit Lindsay Graham chortling all the way, calling it the best money America ever spent? Spent for what? To erect an anti-Western coalition of countries bent on creating a more competitive world currency than the dollar? ...

Regardless what you think of Putin, the fact is right now the United States offers the world nothing hopeful like this. Just the opposite. The U.S. has rabbited so far down the deep state’s dirty-tricks hole that our entire foreign policy is now just a vast secretive effort to undermine things other nations are doing, rather than building anything better ourselves.

The core problem is that our current crop of DEI-infused leaders lack the intellectual capacity to build anything. They can’t run a profitable lemonade stand without first regulating their competitors out of business. In other words, the only thing they are good at is breaking stuff.

My fanciful dream is that, if Trump is elected, we might shut down for good the deep-state’s dirty tricks division, and join the BRICS. Maybe we could work with other countries instead of trying to force them to swallow drag queens. Maybe, as a significant BRICS member, we could help build a new, better, more stable, less manipulated, gold-based world currency. Maybe we could finally replace the corrupt, ineffective, cronyist United Nations with something that actually works.

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/trumps-october-surprise-friday-october

Yesteday BRICS released a comprehensive plan to which its members and applicant members agreed. BRICS is not, in fact, creating any new global currency. Instead, it’s creating an alternative international payments platform, for people buying and selling things across borders, or for when nations trade with each other (to buy weapons, grain, or oil, for three examples).

Right now, everyone must use a common payment settlement system called SWIFT. SWIFT is U.S. created and effectively controlled, even though it is ostensibly privately owned and supposedly located in Belgium. The thought that SWIFT is at all independent is a great gag that everyone at the State Department always guffaws about making them cough champagne up their noses.

For many countries, SWIFT has at least two huge problems. When I say the platform is effectively U.S.-controlled, you can imagine all the implications. Users’ data is supposed to be private, but for some reason everybody thinks the U.S. constantly snoops on where all the money is going to and coming from. (One possibility for why they think that is because Edward Snowden exposed it all in 2013, but I digress again.)

The second, even bigger problem is that the U.S. acts like the spoiled kid at his birthday party, refusing to let the kids he doesn’t like ride the rented pony. In other words, the U.S. forces countries to do things they hate, like teach their kids trans techniques, by threatening to cut them off from SWIFT, or snatching their money as it travels through the collected SWIFT system.

Russia, for example, is cut off from SWIFT under U.S. sanctions. And $300 billion of its money was seized while sitting in a SWIFT clearinghouse bank. The implacable Russians are great poker players, you can’t never tell if they’re at all mad about Biden snatching their $300 billion or exploding their undersea pipelines.

But you can imagine how mad the Russians must be.

The Russians are mad enough to spend their time and money leading a world movement to replace the G-7 and its captive SWIFT system. Which would be horrible for us.

Once BRICS has its own interbanking system, they won’t need to trade in dollars anymore, not unless they need something from the U.S. or from a G-7 country. For complicated reasons, the reduced demand for dollars just from those lost transfers will drastically worsen our debt problem. And maybe more important for BRICS countries, the U.S. won’t be able threaten sanctions to force them to swallow every lunatic social experiment that comes down the liberal U.S. pike.

The BRICS pitched their interbanking system yesterday as a non-threatening “alternative” to SWIFT, rather than any kind of direct competitor. Having choices, they stressed, just improves everyone’s outcomes. But that logic is like claiming that when you parked your taco truck right next to Jose’s taco truck, it is actually better for Jose’s taco trade since diners like different choices of tacos.

Jose is not likely to agree. Jose is likely to go loco. ...

The U.S. could shut this BRICS initiative down easily and immediately. All we need to do is reform SWIFT. If the U.S. stopped using SWIFT to sanction other countries, and SWIFT opened up its system transparently, and the U.S. stopped using SWIFT for spying, then BRICS would be unnecessary.

And everyone would keep trading in dollars.

In other words, we could rescue the dollar. We only need to give up the ‘dirty tricks’ tool we use to force other countries to make their kids sit through drag queen happy hours. But Biden’s neocons won’t try that simple remedy, will they? They’ll let the dollar be destroyed before they give up their economic wonder weapon.