Tipping the Scale Blog

Blinken is Pushing for Ukrainian Teens to Die for US Hegemony

12/5/2024

Caitlin Johnstone
Dec 05, 2024

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken repeated the US government’s new position that Ukraine needs to start sending 18 to 25 year-olds to fight in its war with Russia, telling Reuters on Monday that “getting younger people into the fight, we think, many of us think, is necessary.” This comes even as polls have begun showing that Ukrainians favor making a deal with Russia to end this war as quickly as possible.

This is one of those things that looks more evil the longer you stare at it. They’re pushing for teenagers to be thrown into the fires of an unwinnable war like it’s nothing — like a corporation saying they need to hire more staff to accommodate their growing business. And why? To tie up Russia so that Syria can be turned into a smoking crater and allow the US war machine to focus its crosshairs on Iran and China, with the end goal of total planetary domination. All because some swamp monsters decided after the fall of the Soviet Union that the US must maintain unipolar global hegemony no matter the cost.

Ukraine barely even has anyone in the country from ages 18 to 25 for various reasons (many of which predate this war), but the managers of the US-centralized empire are pushing to scrape out the few they do have and toss them into the landmines and artillery fire just to keep this unwinnable war going for a few more months. Whether they succeed or not, the fact that they even tried is so profoundly psychopathic it’s actually hard to wrap your mind around.

You won’t see anyone in Tony Blinken’s family headed to the frontlines in Ukraine. These freaks see the population of this planet as nothing more than pawns on their grand chessboard, and they will sacrifice them just as casually.

Continue reading Caitlin Johnstone on Substack.

Pushback in the Ranks of Antiwar Vets

10/28/2024

Sounding off against the Duopoly and misplaced advocacy in the ranks of Veterans For Peace

Gene Marx
Oct 28, 2024

Today, in the antiwar Veterans for Peace organizational Listserv, a member of Veterans For Peace surprisingly - or maybe not so surprisingly considering the fear-based tactics of both POTUS candidates - advocated for the Harris/Walz ticket in swing states.

As feckless and corporate as they usually are, they are still much better on women's rights, civil rights, anti-trust, voting rights, the environment and much else
There would be far fewer women success stories, and a far smaller black middle class were it not for the Dems.

All of that could be lost.
If you live in a swing state, I advise a vote for Harris/Walz; in a non-swing state knock yourself out voting for an alternative to the duopoly.

Peace,
*Martin

Most of us steer clear of electoral politics in deference to 501(c)(3) rules set forth by law regarding nonprofit election activity, but I just couldn’t let this go.

Hey Martin*,

How does a Veterans For Peace member "serve the cause of world peace" and work with others "to abolish war as an instrument of national policy," as mandated by our Statement of Purpose, yet deliberately cast a vote for anyone "who is pledged to help operate the [Empire's] slaughter machine, and ...not see any would-be operators of that machine as meaningfully different from any other," to quote Caitlin Johnstone in her Substack piece today? The candidate you recommend for swing-state voters, Kamala Harris, is a willful accomplice to the ongoing US/Israeli slaughter of hundreds of thousands in the Middle East and pledges to keep the killing going, wherever and however possible, with "the most lethal fighting force in the world." I could not help but respond to you in this thread after reading Caitlin's piece, which resonates with so many independent, uncompromisingly pro-peace voters, particularly this quote:

"Americans are the most propagandized population on this planet, and their propaganda indoctrination is at its most intensive during the quadrennial performance ritual known as the US presidential race. The whole thing is geared toward falsely exaggerating the differences between the two candidates while drawing emphasis away from the 99 percent of the issues on which they are indistinguishable from each other. And those 99 percent similarities happen to be on all the most murderous and tyrannical behaviors of the US government."

BTW, most of the electoral concerns you cited are easily dispelled, but I vote third party or independent rather than endorse a warmongering agenda from either legacy party campaign to safeguard my domestic comfort. And as far as VP Harris goes, it's a simple case of payback for me.

EXCOMM MEETS IN WEST WING Sky V pinterest.com

Finally, today marks the 62nd anniversary of the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, with Nikita Khruschev conceding the dismantling and removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. Analysts like Peter Kornbluh conclude it owes its successful resolution to JFK's commitment to negotiate and find common ground in a dangerous nuclear world. Could any of us realistically consider either one of these doofuses, Trump or Harris, engaging with Khrushchev or the Joint Chiefs in the West Wing ExComm? With Curtis Lemay? McNamara, Bundy? We would have been starshine for decades by now.

China May Be Putting Its Nukes on Hair-Trigger Alert popularmechanics.com

Or in a similar global crisis today, with thousands of nuclear weapons on trigger alert, Putin, or Xi?

Finally, it will not matter which POTUS candidate is eventually inaugurated in January 2025. The hawkish Democratic foreign policy establishment, totally embraced by Joe Biden for more than fifty years, will still be running the show and calling the shots well after he has been packed off to assisted care. Barring a foreign policy catastrophe inflicting lasting damage to its core or leveraging for the demise of the Duopoly through the electoral process for a more diverse source of peaceful expertise and experience, it is likely to be a long haul.

So, strap in and brace for impact.

Peace, someday soon?
Gene

*Alias

Terrified Democrats and the Political Cost of Genocide

10/12/2024

OK, in just 24 days the US electorate will decide who will be the next suitable figurehead for a cadre of power brokers that have been manipulating government policy and politicians since long before 9/11. Soon, no more ads, no more inane rhetoric, with millions of Blue and Red team faithful casting votes as if their ballots were relevant outside of swing states.

While the GOP, even independents, close ranks behind Trump, campaign polls still teem with terrified Democrats hoping to stop the Orange Man, if it takes a Cheney family endorsement to do it.

Even with the timely demise and incongruity of the "lesser of two evils argument" and Jill Stein gaining ground in Michigan and Wisconsin, voters are still told the Harris/Walz ticket will not only save what's left of our democracy but will be 'better' for Muslims. Journalist and geopolitical analyst Sami Hamdi, provides a devastating counter to The Thinking Muslim's Muhammad Jalal for those who would still dismiss a third party vote while the US/Israeli bipartisan slaughter continues unrestrained in Palestine.

Israel will eventually pay price for Gaza genocide going on for a year: Turkish President Erdogan

10/8/2024

Anadolu English
Anadolu Agency Official YouTube Channel Broadcasting in English

On October 7th, the Turkish government released a stunning 2-minute video summary of how Turkiye and so much of the rest of the world view the past year of Israel's genocidal madness. Stepping outside the Western bubble and away from the collective West's propagandist narrative, the rest of the world will always remember the slaughter in Palestine in only one way.

On This Day in Particular

10/7/2024

Caitlin Johnstone
Oct 07, 2024

On this day in particular, I would like to express my deepest sympathies for the victims of Israeli murderousness over the past year.

On this day in particular, I would like to mourn the thousands upon thousands of children who have been killed by western-supplied bullets and bombs in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon over the last twelve months.

On this day in particular I would like to express my sincerest condolences to the Palestinian parents who have had to bury their children, or pieces of their children, or bags of shapeless carnage they’ve been told were their children — if those parents are still alive themselves.

On this day in particular I would like to lift up my heart to the people who are being ethnically cleansed from northern Gaza right at this very moment, and the people in southern Lebanon who are being subjected to daily Israeli massacres.

I wish I could bring myself to express sympathy for other groups on this particular day, like the Israelis who were killed in the Hamas attack one year ago. But I think there’s been enough of that. I really do.

Sympathy for Israel has been used over this past year to manufacture consent for the slaughter of mountains of human beings in advancement of land grabs and military agendas that were planned long before the seventh of October 2023. The sympathy which Israel received after the Hamas attack was immediately weaponized in advancement of those agendas, and has been weaponized every single day since.

When someone is using a weapon to hurt people, a good person will take their weapon away, and won’t give them any more weapons. This is true of actual, physical weapons like the ones the western empire has been pouring into the Israeli war machine, and it is true of the weaponized sympathy that Israel apologists have been using to justify its genocidal atrocities.

Expressing sympathy for Israel on this particular day would be like expressing sympathy for a mother with Munchausen syndrome by proxy who is poisoning her children in order to garner sympathy and attention from her community. That sympathy — which would normally be a very healthy response to the deaths and trauma of others — is in this case the actual problem.

And even if this were not the case, Israel has received more than enough sympathy already. It is an extensively documented fact that the western press have been vastly more sympathetic toward the Israeli victims of the Hamas attack than they have been to Israel’s victims in Gaza, despite the victims of Israeli atrocities being orders of magnitude greater in number. This discrepancy in sympathy is so extensive that it can only be called journalistic malpractice, which is only made possible by the fact that Arabs are not recognized as fully human under the rules of the western empire.

So on this day in particular I will be expressing sympathy for the populations upon whom Israel has inflicted many, many times more death and trauma than it received one year ago — and for those populations only.

Read complete article on Substack, and listen to a recording of this article below.

A Shout Out to Stanislav

9/27/2024

A Shout Out to Stanislav
Anniversaries we were lucky to ever commemorate, at least once more

Gene Marx
Sep 27, 2024

Just after midnight, on September 26, 1983, the most destructive species on planet earth almost went up in smoke.

Stanislav Petrov in an image from a family album. Via Statement Film

In the Soviet Serpukhov-15 satellite control center, ninety miles southwest of Moscow, alarms shrieked and red lights were flashing. An American intercontinental ballistic missile launch had been detected. System data indicated with high reliability that five Minuteman ICBMs were definitely en route to strike Red Square with nuclear weapons. One after another, sirens howled, but the officer on duty, Soviet Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov, wasn’t buying it. Something just wasn’t right. Call it intuition and years later, Petrov was quoted as saying his intuition won out.

I had a funny feeling in my gut. Who starts a nuclear war against another superpower with just five ICBMs?

The U.S. would have launched hundreds, possibly thousands, yet ground-based radar installations – which search for missiles rising above the horizon – still showed no evidence of an imminent attack. A skeptical Lt. Col. Petrov ignored launch protocol. With a “phone in one hand, the intercom in the other,” relayed nothing up his chain of command. A full Soviet retaliation was avoided by a 50-50 gut decision.

Read complete article on Substack.

Targeting Dissent, Surveillance Overreach and Secret Political Retaliation

8/17/2024

Air Marshal National Council warned by TSA whistleblowers of flagrant misuse of Quiet Skies surveillance, noted the surveillance operation appears to be targeting dissent.

Gene Marx
August 16, 2024

The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.
George Orwell

A story broke over the weekend before last that according to TSA whistleblowers former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard had landed on the TSA terror watch list as part of its Quiet Skies program, which is, purportedly, aimed at protecting American air travelers from domestic terrorists. Stranger still was the timing of Gabbard’s addition to that list. Incredible, but there’s more.

Interurban hiking trail - Bellingham

Before this stunning revelation, my dog Cleo was taking me for our daily drag on an interurban trail when I met another hiker named Brigitte, about my age. She was walking her blind Border Collie, Buster, which was enough of an icebreaker to talk “dog.” I did notice the remnants of a German accent while we exchanged introductions, and abruptly my surname - Marx - moved our chat in more ancestry dot com direction, including her not so fond remembrances of a childhood in East Berlin. Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, our conversation took an off-ramp toward her current observations of the similarities now in the US with Soviet East Germany.

Stasi’s "‘no touch torture’…secret police’s most terrifying weapon yourdestinationnow.com

As Cleo and Buster settled in, Brigitte recounted growing up under Stasi Zersetzung repression, an East German psychological warfare technique used by state security functionaries to undermine perceived threats to the state. She remembers the harassment and worsening oppression and so many citizens risking being shot by border guards attempting to leave. Fast forward another lifetime, Bridgette is now noticing similarities with US government intrusions and asked if I was scared, because she was. Like a lot of Americans my age I said I was more angry than scared, pissed at the constant political gaslighting, censorship, rigged elections and more, but mostly just incredibly sad for my country.

I could have gone on, with the constant threat of nuclear annihilation keeping me up at nights, but Brigitte’s fear was as tangible as my animosity and we were both navigating the same undercurrent of apprehension.

Read complete article on Substack.

The Cost of Following Orders

7/12/2024

Catherine Herridge

BREAKING: Army and National Guard accused of abandoning 24-year-old soldier with “debilitating heart condition” that internal memo “linked” to COVID-19 mRNA vaccine. New military records confirm the soldier's heart injury was "In Line of Duty,” and details her account of "complications since receiving the second dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine."

Moderna did not respond to our questions. Army Specialist Karoline Stancik now faces over $70,000 in medical debt.

EPISODE ONE: “The Cost of Following Orders” Subscribe on X
@C__Herridge

BREAKING: Army and National Guard accused of abandoning 24-year-old soldier with “debilitating heart condition” that internal memo “linked” to COVID-19 mRNA vaccine.

New military records confirm the soldier's heart injury was "In Line of Duty,” and details her account of… pic.twitter.com/nbZgbDA6v3
— Catherine Herridge (@C__Herridge) June 24, 2024

Upping the Ante in Crimea with Western Value Cluster Bombing of Sevastopol Civilians

6/23/2024

Ukraine attacks Crimea with U.S.-coordinated satellite positioning and ATACMS armed with cluster munitions

Gene Marx
Jun 23, 2024

According to a RT 1555 GMT (7:55 Pacific) update:

The death toll in the Ukrainian shelling of Sevastopol has risen to five, including three children, the city’s governor, Mikhail Razvozhaev, told reporters. At least 124 people have been injured, including 27 children, five of whom are in intensive care, Russia’s Health Ministry said.

It appears the Biden administration’s recent decision to lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of certain weapons to hit Russian targets - NOT including longer-range ATACMS - has also hit a deadly snag, for at least five Crimean civilians, including three children (and counting), as a holiday at the beach turned into a killing field, under a downpour of US-made cluster bombs.

A view shows bloodied sun loungers following a Ukrainian missile attack amid Russia's military operation in Ukraine, in Sevastopol, Republic of Crimea, Russia. © Sputnik

“Responsibility for the deliberate missile attack on the civilians of Sevastopol is borne above all by Washington, which supplied these weapons to Ukraine, and by the Kyiv regime, from whose territory this strike was carried out," the ministry said.

According to Reuters, the Kremlin Defense Ministry, without elaborating, will respond. Neither Ukraine nor the United States has commented.

So, while US-supplied weapons prolong hefty kill counts in both Gaza and Eastern Europe, our undisputed Western moral authority keeps dragging the rest of us up the escalation ladder.

Just Like That, Another Resistance Fighter

6/21/2024