White Pill Wednesday #16
Questionable Quagmire · Republic of D.O.G.E.
Black Pill(s)
Questionable Quagmire
It has been 1000 days since the war in Ukraine began on February 24th, 2022. Since then there have been:
$175 BILLION spent by the US alone to support the war up until now
$80 BILLION increase in Defense spending by Russia from 2022 to 2024
We may never know the true numbers behind these stats but they’re all we have to go off of - it’s all they will tell us.
And what have we gotten for it? TikTok edits of the most “televised” war in human history?
An entire generation of young men slaughtered for what? So that we in the West can sit idling by with our creature comforts as we pat ourselves on the back for being the “good guys”? I mean at what point do we start to question why we have invested so much into this conflict to get absolutely nowhere closer to resolving it?
For the record, I am no Russo-Ukrainian historian. This is not a breakdown of the Ukrainian war and what the right “take” is. I am against the war for the simple fact that untold billions have been spent by the military industrial complex to enable and accelerate this war towards a precipice.
A precipice which ends with nuclear Armageddon if even a single nuclear weapon is fired. Meanwhile the US has 1,770 deployed warheads and 1,938 in reserve while Russia has 1,770 deployed warheads and 2,670 stored warheads. And that’s just those two nations - that’s not counting China, UK, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, or North Korea. If you haven’t read my post on Nuclear War and how even a single nuke leads to planetary devastation then I recommend you give it a glance.
Whatever your opinions - the following 3 facts are publicly known and verifiable with even the most cursory of Google searches.
In 2014 a phone call between Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt was leaked (supposedly by the Russians) which exposed how the US was essentially choosing who would be in power following the 2014 Ukrainian revolution.
There is an extensive history between the two nations and the contested territory they are massacring themselves over but we do not have time to get into that. My primary concern is the fact that despite the black and white imagery the political/cultural elite force down our throats - this war is anything but.
I mean for fuck’s sake Zelensky appeared on the Golden Globes after being introduced by Sean Penn.
Am I supposed to take notes on morality from Diddy party aficionados? Are we to believe Epstein’s friends? And don’t even get me started on Nickelodeon.
We’re told by the corporate press that this is a battle of authoritarian rule versus democratic freedoms. Meanwhile we have actual proof of ACTUAL Nazi factions fighting for Ukraine with little to no acknowledgement from the government officials that met with them in the first place!
My point is - we are being sold on a lie. This war is not a clean cut Good vs Evil bedtime story. There are gradations of grey that extend back centuries to the inches of land being fought over by both young and old men to seemingly no end.
Catch the age of some of those men? They look well over 60 - what does that say about Ukraine’s population? Since the beginning of the war 25% of Ukraine’s population has either died or fled the country. What is it that we expect to happen when a critical mass of their men die and they are left without any options? Do you think then that maybe a nation or international organization might get bold enough to send in troops?
At the rate that we’re going it seems as though the “Allies” will not stop no matter what until the job is done.
So let me ask again - what happens when Ukraine inevitably loses a critical mass of their eligible army recruits? It’s been 3 years and they’ve lost 25% of their population. Not to mention the millions that have abandoned the country to escape the draft. How much more are they willing to lose to win this on behalf of all involved special interests?
Let’s not forget Ukraine has not held an election since the war, has actively restricted freedoms of the press, are at the GLOBAL forefront of Digital ID implementation, and BlackRock as well as JPMorgan stand to gain billions from the war along with the military industrial complex.
How about all the corruption within Ukraine itself where multiple officials have stolen wartime funds for their own uses?
The fact that this conflict continues to escalate only adds to the importance of ending it expeditiously.
So where does that leave us?
Untold billions of our hard earned tax dollars spent on a war thousands of kilometres away
An entire generations of men slaughtered on both sides
Millions of acres once populated and habitable now reduced to rubble.
With every passing battle we inch closer towards total oblivion.
And for what? Inches of land? The right to say the “Good” guys won?
We are quite literally risking the entirety of human civilization and its contributions for a war that many of us would not fight ourselves. Why? It doesn’t have to be this way. There is no way that a peace deal of some sort cannot be worked out. And the fact that it isn’t being pushed aggressively signals all you need to know about the intentions of those opting for this war.
I have faith that there yet remains a possibility for de-escalation. We were on the precipice of such a disaster only a generation ago. The men and women involved made choices that led to the avoidance of total nuclear annihilation when it seemed the most likely outcome. I pray we are lucky enough to have that privilege and have not already made the grave mistake that history will look back on in shame - if there is anyone left to record the events.
For a laugh, here’s that one time that the Canadian Prime Minister aka Glorious Leader Trudeau aka Castreau stood with the entirety of parliament in applauding an honest to God Nazi in front of Zelensky.
No you’re not having a stroke. The Trudeau government is SO gung-ho for Zelensky that they invited an actual Nazi to parliament and gave him a STANDING OVATION. And then when this came to light Trudeau had the speaker of the house step down and take the blame.
I figured we lived in 2024 and that if anyone would be good at a background check it would be the government, no? I guess not. You can’t help yourself by seeing this all as funny because the only alternative is to cry.
I leave you with this - make of it what you will.
This is from Professor Jeffrey Sachs lecture and Q&A at Cambridge Union which you can see in its entirety here:
The video before it starts at 1:05:00.
White Pill(s)
Republic of D.O.G.E.
The following image has the potential to be among the greatest of political experiments ever achieved by man.
What you’re looking at here is the announcement of Donald Trump in establishing the
Department
Of
Government
Efficiency
AKA D.O.G.E.
TL:DR - Donald Trump has announced that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead a department aimed to dismantle needless bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies. They will provide advice and guidance from outside of government instead as a partnership with the White House.
Now I don’t know what y’all know about Vivek but Elon Musk cut 80% of all X (formerly Twitter) employees and it remains as the most robust and popular social media platform on the globe.
Even ignoring that - let’s take a brief look at examples of frivolous US government expenditures.
$700,000 study to determine whether Neil Armstrong’s famous quote was transcribed accurately.
$500,000 spent on maintaining a self-cleaning toilet that hasn’t been flushed since 2017.
The list goes on and we can be here all day uncovering new ways the US government has wasted the funds of their taxpayers.
One thing to keep in mind though - the government is just people. It’s made of people just like you and me. They have all the same flaws that everyone else does. They are just as likely to be treacherous, jealous, sadistic, selfish, and abusive as anyone else. They are not infallible - they are just people.
Except when they make a decision to spend funds - it’s we the taxpayer that foots the bill. And the money that is taken from taxpayers is a fraction of the finite time they have spent working while they’re alive. Time is money - and our time has been thoroughly fucked with.
Even ignoring the US for a moment - take a second to think back to even a single moment that your local or national government has abused your hard-earned tax dollars by spending them frivolously. Not even Japan is immune from this.
Here in Canada our esteemed leaders have decided to allocate funds to such interesting endeavours as:
$10,000,000 tax dollars for "Generating Evidence and New Directions for Equitable Results (GENDER)"
More than $250K spent on Gov. Gen. Julie Payette's demands for privacy at Rideau Hall.
Once again, the list goes on and on and on.
The deeper you dig the more waste you’ll find - of this I have no doubt. Is it any wonder then that Canada’s public service sector has grown more than 43% since Trudeau came to power? Why wouldn’t you want to work for an employer that has ballooned to epic proportions with its spending along with a guaranteed pension?
Now think about what it means for someone like Elon Musk or Vivek to come along and make the commitment to cut government spending from the largest government ever in recorded human history.
Is there any chance the affected people will go gentle into that good night? Methinks not.
D.O.G.E. has their work cut out for them and as a concerned Canuck I wish them all the best. No system that is run by people is ever 100% efficient. We’ve all had jobs where a certain chunk of the workforce was skating by on the efforts of the few that kept the place running. I don’t think there is a single market out there that isn’t dealing with such a problem.
Now imagine that workplace dynamic you first saw flipping burgers implemented on a macro level that affects hundreds of millions of people. And when they fuck up guess who has to pay for it? You. Us. All of us. With our finite time on this planet.
So who’s to say there isn’t some fat to be trimmed? At the least they could investigate these various departments and organizations to see where costs can be cut. And think of what those freed funds could be put towards instead of sustaining a bloated bureaucracy.
We are headed towards an age of disruptive challenges unlike any we’ve ever faced before. Cryptocurrencies, Artificial Intelligence, rapidly declining global birth rates, development of nuclear weapons, etc etc. These issues are far too big to be handled by the snails-pace governments we have become accustomed to.
If D.O.G.E. achieves its mandate it will not only signal the importance of maintaining efficiency in the US but send a powerful message to citizens abroad that maybe their government spending is also worth taking a look at. If Elon Musk and Vivek achieve their goals it can pave the way for others to do the same around the world - and that’s not nothing.
It may not seem important at times when we see headlines of millions, billions, trillions being spent. It’s hard enough to visualize what $100k looks like let alone a million or more. But this initiative could free millions of funds that could help countless people across the US and eventually abroad.
Godspeed gentlemen, the world is watching.
As always, I will be streaming this week’s White Pill Wednesday podcast on 𝕏 which you can find the link for here.