We are tracking many issues here in the week of the U.S. Pluto return, and have a summary tonight. However, our greatest concern is for Cate Ryzhenko, who has fled inner-Kiev where she lives, works a goes to school, to get to the outskirts of the city with a friend of her late father. We have been in touch all week, and by show time we will have a report from her.
However, our greatest concern is for Cate Ryzhenko, who has fled inner-Kiev where she lives, works a goes to school, to get to the outskirts of the city with a friend of her late father. We have been in touch all week, and by show time we will have a report from her.
We are fast approaching the March 2-3 singularity point at the Pisces New Moon. I’ll leave out more details about the program; I’ve got that covered, though I will say this.
While in some ways it may serve that purpose, I don’t intend Planet Waves as an information source; I primarily intend Planet Waves as a place of refuge, where you may learn, about yourself and the world.
In true Pisces style, I offer a long, un-rushed, musically-infused program each Friday night as a place to hang out, and do some processing of what you’ve experienced all week. I consider us more of a therapy space than a newsroom.
Notes on the Invasion of Ukraine from the Brownstone Institute
An organization recently appeared called the Brownstone Institute. It came out of the Great Barrington Declaration of late 2020. I just received this article from them, quoted below. As best I could reckon events of this week, I came to the same observations. This is written by Jeffrey Tucker, founder of the institute. He is being extremely polite here.
Quote:
The “free world” has lost the moral high ground to preach to the “unfree” world about rights, liberties, and democracy. For two years, most every government in the West experimented with new forms of servitude in the name of public health. They showed how emergency powers can be deployed to lock people in their homes, shut businesses, cancel church, close parks, ban travel, censor speech – massive attacks on essential freedoms all justified simply because the people in power said it was justified.
Further, the pandemic response revived the utility of nationalism (with travel bans and even vaccine approvals), class demarcations in policy (essential and nonessential businesses and workers), segregation and discrimination based on biology (vaccine passports), and the unquestioned hegemony of the administrative state over the whole of society. The experience further proved that there need be no limits to state ambition: even the absurd promise to eradicate a respiratory virus can serve as justification for a power grab.
Even the courts went silent, and the media could be relied upon to quell dissident voices and push out propaganda from the bureaucracies. Big Tech, once decried by the establishment for its libertarian ethos, also enlisted on the side of control, censoring and canceling accounts that raised doubts concerning the competence of the managerial elite.
What a lovely example to display to would-be authoritarians the world over! The pandemic response was brutal. It contradicted all law and tradition. It flew in the face of public-health science from the past. It was an enormous flop from a scientific point of view, of course. But the enterprise did create a political precedent that will resonate for decades. It firmly established that states can do what they want, when they want, provided the leadership maintains a posture of infallibility and the population is sufficiently fearful.
This was the West’s gift to Putin. Putin is now returning the favor.
Vladimir Putin version 3A with my annotations, from a 2014 episode I did about Uncle Vlad. That tape is lost to history, though I’ll return to this chart at some point soon. The data source is Russian astrologers who claim to have it; I consider it a plausible hypothetical chart.
