"Mueller isn't going to find anything in 2017 that these vast, sprawling networks wouldn't have found in 2016. He's not going to find anything by 'following the money' that couldn't be found infinitely more efficaciously via Orwellian espionage. The factions within the intelligence community that were working to sabotage the incoming administration last year would have leaked proof of collusion if they'd had it. They did not have it then, and they do not have it now. Mueller will continue finding evidence of corruption throughout his investigation, since corruption is to DC insiders as water is to fish, but he will not find evidence of collusion to win the 2016 election that will lead to Trump's impeachment. It will not happen."I don't make predictions very often. Pretty much my entire worldview is premised upon the idea that we are in a wildly unprecedented point in history, that old patterns are breaking down and giving way to novelty, and that, more and more, the only thing we should expect is the unexpected. If I didn't believe that our species is capable of breaking out of our predictable patterns and pulling off something miraculous from way out of left field, I wouldn't be bothering with the fight against the omnicidal, ecocidal Orwellian oppression machine that is driving us toward extinction. I'd just make art and hug my kids a lot and wait for the end to come.
~ Me, last year.
Ordinary Americans rarely thought about Russia prior to 2016. It certainly wasn't a nation the rank-and-file west was thinking and talking about constantly. Then all of a sudden, through nothing other than the power of sheer narrative, it's become an omnipotent, insidious force in the eyes of the public with the ability to infiltrate and overturn democracies all around the world and influence major events everywhere from the US to the UK to Syria. The Facebook ads could have been a second-page story for one day and nobody would have cared. The DNC hack, even if it happened, could have disappeared from the news after a day or two and it would have gone unnoticed. But because the mass media propaganda machine has been hammering Russia, Russia, Russia all day every day, it now seems perfectly reasonable to believe that Putin is behind every major event in the world; perfectly reasonable for so much of the Syria saber rattling to be targeted not at Damascus but at Moscow.
[...]
After his surprise win Trump was taken in, shown around, and then pressured by Washington insiders and/or by the political pressures of Russiagate into doing the thing Hillary Clinton had been planning on doing: greatly escalating the new cold war. Obama's refusal to fully collaborate with ramping up tensions with Russia was scheduled to be rectified by Clinton, and since they didn't get her they're getting the same thing from Plan B.
This was all planned. A desperate, declining empire with a need to sabotage the rise of nonconforming nations and their allies has been planning for years to either squeeze Russia like a python until it taps out and moves out of the way, or until it fights back and is crushed militarily. That's the plan, and since the life of the empire depends upon its success, they'll do literally anything to make sure it succeeds. This includes lying to the world to an extent that has never before been seen in modern history.
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