Convergence Calling

“The current conflict between Europe and America is not reducible towards contrasting approaches towards Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.” —Frank Furedi on Substack

“Contrary to Western media's trash talk, Russian military has not been degraded. If anything, it has been significantly upgraded.” —Alex Krainer

You’re going to see what a truly consequential span of weeks, looks like, as Western Civ goes into full churn on April’s doorstep. Remember, TS Eliot called it the “cruelest month.” Too many uncomfortable things are converging, too many ongoing operations are unwinding, too many tensions are breaking.

The conclusion of “Joe Biden’s” Ukraine War fiasco looms. You can tell because The New York Times published a gigantic piece Sunday detailing how the Pentagon and the CIA actually ran all of Ukraine’s tactical operations out of a base in Wiesbaden, Germany — after building a colossal Ukraine war machine post our 2014 color revolution in Kiev. Since the very start of the hot war in 2022, we did all the targeting for the weapons we gave them and planned their every move. What a surprise! (Not.)

The motive behind all that, as conceived by US neo-cons and NATO neo-morons, was to “weaken” Russia, bust it up, and seize its resources. All the sanctions piled on only induced Russia into an import-replacement campaign that actually strengthened its economy, while the war led to a revolution in Russian war-fighting tactics and advanced weaponry. Now, the whole thing is ending in Ukraine’s defeat and the West’s humiliation.

The Times could have published this in 2023-24, but it would have been a major embarrassment for “Joe Biden” and his shadow managers moving into the election. They put it out just now because the jig is up and the paper desperately needs to pretend that it’s ahead of events to preserve the last shreds of its credibility.

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Mr. Trump, the uber-realist, knows that the Russians are going to roll up in Ukraine this spring and there is increasingly not much that can be done about that, except to try to put the best face on it — which is, that it wasn’t his war. As long as the coke freak Zelensky remains in charge, Ukraine will be negotiation-unworthy, as the Russian phrase goes. So, US-Russia peace talks were largely diplomatic showbiz. Both Putin and Mr. Trump were painfully aware of this, and hence, Mr. Trump’s latest performative bluster about “more sanctions” will probably not amount to anything.

And also hence, the synchronized idiocy on display in France, Germany, and the UK. They were all-in on the neo-con scheme that is now falling apart and its failure has driven them plumb crazy. As the US drops out of the stupid proxy war, they declare their intention to take it from here and go beat-up Russia. Their war-drums are teaspoons beating on so many quiches.

Soon-to-be chancellor Friedrich Merz proposes an 800-billion-Euro debt spree to finance the re-arming of Germany, which, just now, is utterly incapable of war. He is insane. German industry is collapsing from a lack of affordable natural gas (as arranged by “Joe Biden” blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, danke schön). Turning Volkswagen factories to missile production will not help the German people one bit. It probably will remind them about the Weimar hyper-inflation, though.

Macron pledges to put French boots on the ground in Ukraine. Ain’t gonna happen. Today, his stooge judiciary found political rival Marine LePen guilty of a Mickey Mouse offense in order to bar her from running against him in the next election. Ain’t gonna work. He will provoke the biggest national uprising since the Bastille. His government will be too busy putting down French Revolution 2.0 to play war games in history’s graveyard of armies. Maybe he’ll try nukes. I’m sure that’ll work — if you’re eager to see Russian hypersonic “hazelnuts” rain down on the Île-de-France.

And then, there is the amazing idiot PM Keir Starmer in the UK, calling on his “coalition of the willing” to step up and intervene in the lost cause that is Ukraine. How many hands went up on that call? For practical purposes, the Brits have no war-fighting capacity whatsoever, and no resources for generating such capacity. And, anyway, they are facing some dreadful combo of a civil war / internal jihad against their own indigenous population, plus an economic collapse cherry-on-top.

In short, Europe has so many incipient existential problems that the whole story is about to shift its focus from the already-sealed fate of Ukraine to the very dark prospects for the core nations of Old-World Western Civ. I wouldn’t plan a vacation there this year.

Meanwhile, expect a pile-up of consequence in our own sore-beset USA in the upcoming cruelest month. Today, the DOGE team visits the CIA. It could spell an end to decades of mad frolics emanating from that gigantic black box of black ops. Director John Ratcliffe has cordially invited Mr. Musk’s technicians and he is probably eager to discover exactly what mischief has been hidden from him by the immense, secretive, foul bureaucracy he lately assumed command over.

The Epstein materials recently recovered out of the FBI’s rogue New York offices of the agency are considered so critical by Director Patel that he assigned 1000 agents to review and process the docs full-time. That includes redacting names of many additional sex-trafficked children. Expect to see the release of a lot of that in the next thirty days with dire reverberations in the celebrity realms of politics, finance, and showbiz.

JudgeGate is moving toward its climax at the same time. Tuesday this week, Rep. Jim Jordan’s House Judiciary Committee will hold hearings on the DC circuit’s lawfare offensive against Mr. Trump’s executive authority. It would be nice to hear from DC district judges James Boasberg, Amy Berman Jackson, Tanya Chutkan, Beryl Howell, and Amir Ali, who have been zealously active in what looks like a coordinated lawfare campaign against the chief executive. Norm Eisen is not a judge, but he is the central conductor of the lawfare orchestra, and he has a bit of ‘splainin’ to do. One can even imagine something like a RICO referral emerge from that rather brazen operation. Anyway, the whole matter is going to land in the Supreme Court before April is out.

Also expect a lot of movement in the Covid-19 story coming out of the newly-reorganized CDC, NIH, FDA, NIAID, and other corners of the public health bureaucracy. Evidence is piling up fast of tragic and awful blowback from the Covid vaccine. There is too much to be ignored any longer and momentous decisions must follow, starting with taking the Pfizer and Moderna shots off-line. The entire regime of data collection, processing, and public release is about to change and the nation will be shocked by what gets disclosed.

Then there are the financial markets. They do not like the kind of shifts in public perception that return of consequence must bring. Gold alone is sending out a very vivid distress signal for everything else pretending to be an asset or a form of collateral. The equity markets have been wobbling for weeks. Look out below as the Easter eggs roll.

Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 season

Fisherman and the White Boat, Clarks Mills, New York

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"I started my blog, Clusterfuck Nation, almost twenty years ago to chronicle the week-by-week process of our collapsing civilization… What I had not anticipated in The Long Emergency was how badly the process of collapse would disorder the minds of the whole American population and, with that, the consensus about reality." —James Howard Kunstler, CrazyLand

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