RT | Western “half-wits” from “stupid think tanks” are
leading their countries down the road of nuclear armageddon with their
hybrid war against Moscow, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev
wrote on his Telegram channel on Tuesday. Endlessly funneling weapons
and support to Ukraine while pretending not to be directly involved in
the conflict will not work, added the deputy chair of the Russian
Security Council.
The “security guarantees” proposal unveiled by Kiev on Tuesday was “really a prologue to the Third World War,”said Medvedev, calling it a “hysterical appeal” to Western countries engaged in a proxy war against Russia.
If the West continues its “unrestrained pumping of the Kiev regime with the most dangerous types of weapons,” Russia’s military campaign will move to the next level, where “visible boundaries and potential predictability of actions by the parties to the conflict” will be erased and the conflict will take on a life of its own, as wars always do, Medvedev argued.
“And then the Western nations will not be able to sit in their
clean homes, laughing at how they carefully weaken Russia by proxy.
Everything will be on fire around them. Their people will harvest their
grief in full. The land will be on fire and the concrete will melt,” Medvedev wrote, before citing a Bible verse from Revelations 9:18.
“Yet
still the narrow-minded politicians and their stupid think tanks,
thoughtfully twirling a glass of wine in their hands, talk about how
they can deal with us without entering into a direct war. Dull idiots
with a classical education,” Medvedev wrote.
His comments were prompted by Kiev’s publication of a “security treaty”
proposal, developed under the tutelage of former NATO secretary-general
Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The draft envisions the US and its allies
guaranteeing Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders with weapons, ammunition,
financial assistance and training, as well as committing to maintain
sanctions against Russia for as long as Kiev wants, and handing over any
confiscated Russian property to Ukraine.
mcescher | Maurits
Cornelis Escher (1898-1972) is one of the world’s most famous graphic
artists. His art is admired by millions of people worldwide, as can be
seen by the many websites on the internet.
He is born in Leeuwarden as the fourth and
youngest son. After five years the family moves to Arnhem, where he
spends most of his youth. After he has failed his final exam, and after a
short interlude in Delft, M.C. Escher starts with his lessons in
architecture at the School of Architecture and Decorative Arts in
Haarlem.
Already after a week he informs his father that he wants to quit his
architecture lessons and focus on studying graphic arts. He is supported
in this by his teacher Samuel Jesserun de Mesquita, to whom he has
shown his drawings and linocuts.
After completing his school, he travels for
a long time through Italy, where he meets his wife Jetta Umiker and
whom he marries in 1924. They go to Rome, where they live until 1935.
During these 11 years M.C. Escher travels every year through Italy where
he makes drawings and sketches that he later uses in his studio for his
lithographs, woodcuts and wood engravings.
For example, the background in the
lithograph Waterfall (1961) comes from his Italian period. The trees
that are reflected in the woodcut Puddle(1952) are also the same trees
that he uses in his woodcut Pineta by Calvi, made in 1932.
During
the time that he lives and works in Italy, he makes beautiful, also
more realistic works such as the Castrovalva litho in which one can see
already his fascination for perspective: close, far, high and low.
Likewise is the lithograph Atrani, a small town on the Amalfi coast in
Italy, which he makes in 1931 and comes back in his masterpieces
Metamorphosis I and II.
He is most famous for his so-called
impossible drawings, such as Ascending and Descending and Relativity,
but also for his metamorphoses, such as Metamorphosis I, II and III, Air
and Water I and Reptiles.
During his lifetime, Escher made 448
lithographs, woodcuts and wood engravings and more than 2000 drawings
and sketches. Just like some of his famous predecessors – Michelangelo,
Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer and Holbein – Escher is left-handed.
In addition to his work as a graphic artist, he illustrates books,
designs carpets and banknotes, stamps, murals, intarsia panels etc.
M.C. Escher is fascinated by the regular geometric figures of the wall
and floor mosaics in the Alhambra, a fourteenth-century castle in
Granada, Spain, which he visits in 1922 and 1936.
During his years in Switzerland and
throughout the Second World War, he works with great energy on his
hobby. He then makes 62 of the 137 symmetrical drawings he will make in
his life. He also expands his hobby by using these symmetrical drawings
for cutting wooden balls.
He plays with architecture, perspective and
impossible spaces. His art continues to amaze and wonder millions of
people around the world. In his work we recognize his excellent
observation of the world around us and the expression of his own
fantasy. M.C. Escher shows us that reality is wonderful, understandable
and fascinating.
flashbak | Louis Wain (5 August 1860 – 4 July 1939) was an English artist and
diagnosed schizophrenic who made a name from drawing self-conscious,
trippy and anthropomorphic cats and kittens. At the peak of his powers,
he cranked out 1500 original paintings and sketches of cats every year.
They were copied by the million. In Christmas 1903, you could buy 13 new
Louis Wain books. He illustrated more than two-hundred books and had
sixteen very successful Christmas annuals. “He made the cat his own,”
said the author H.G. Wells. “He invented a cat style, a cat society, a
whole cat world.” He was elected president of the National Cat Club, of
course. “Louis Wain was on all our walls some 15 to 20 years ago,” wrote
politician Ramsay MacDonald in 1925. “Probably no artist has given a
greater number of young people pleasure than he has.”
A cat that has “lived a life of ease, seeing nobody and
nothing beyond its mistress, will exhibit the most striking
characteristics of its mistress. Another cat will, perhaps, show itself
in the highest degree suspicious, taking after its master or mistress
again; while a fourth, that has had to fight his way, will quarrel and
rush at everything; and a fifth, that has been allowed to roam the
country, will ruffle up its straw, get underneath its bed to hide right
out of sight, and nothing but force will move it.”
– Wain – the November 1889 issue of Cassell’s Magazine on what he had learned from judging cat shows.
Wain was 24 when he sold his first drawing of cats to The Illustrated London News. Called ‘A Kitten’s Christmas Party’, the
picture portrayed 150 cats doing all manner of humanistic things –
holding a ball, sending invitations, playing games and making speeches.
Spread over two pages, it was an instant hit. A few years earlier he’d
sold his first picture: a drawing of bullfinches. He drew more birds
and animals with little success. And then came the catharsis. At age 23,
Wain fell ill. Peter, a black-and-white cat, would sit on his bed. Wain
passed the time by sketching his pal and handing the sketches to his
wife, Emily. One picture featured 150 cats, each one doing its own
thing. Success was his. Then tragedy struck. Three years after their
marriage, Emily died.
How this changed Wain, we cannot be certain. But he never remarried
and his mental health deteriorated. Despite huge commercial success, by
the 1920’s Wain was broke. In 1924 he was committed to the pauper ward
of London’s Springfield Mental Hospital. He continued to drew cats,
experimenting with new styles and colours.
In 1925, his plight became common knowledge. A public appeal was made
that raised £2,300. The money enabled Wain to move to the Bethlem Royal
Hospital.
In 1930 Wain was transferred to Napsbury Hospital, near St Albans.
Exhibitions of his work were held in London in 1931 and 1937, as well as
a memorial exhibition shortly after his death.
meaningfulparticipation |The case against reality by Donald D. Hoffman
Subtitled “How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes”
Multimodal user interface (MUI) theory*: MUI theory states that “perceptual experiences do not match or approximate properties of the objective world, but instead provide a simplified, species-specific, user interface to that world.”
Perception is not a window on objective reality. It is an interface that hides objective reality behind a veil of helpful icons.
I take my perceptions seriously, but not literally.
startling “Fitness-Beats-Truth” (FBT) theorem, which states that evolution by natural selection does not favor true perceptions—it routinely drives them to extinction. Instead, natural selection favors perceptions that hide the truth and guide useful action.
Space, time, and physical objects are not objective reality. They are simply the virtual world delivered by our senses to help us play the game of life.
Physics and evolution point to the same conclusion: spacetime and objects are not foundational. Something else is more fundamental, and spacetime emerges from it.
Our senses report fitness, and an error in this report could ruin your life. So our senses use “error-correcting codes” to detect and correct errors. Spacetime is just a format our senses use to report fitness payoffs and to correct errors in these reports.
we differ from rocks in two key respects. First, we experience sensations. Second, we have “propositional attitudes,” such as the belief that rocks don’t have headaches we also have meaning, problem solving capability and enactors
Like a rock, we have bona fide physical properties. But unlike a rock, we have conscious experiences and propositional attitudes. Are these also physical? If so, it’s not obvious: What is the mass of dizziness, the velocity of a headache, or the position of the wonder why Chris won’t call?
Our failure to envision a mechanism does not preclude one. Perhaps we’re not clever enough, and an experiment will teach us what we can’t surmise from an armchair. After all, we invest in experiments because they often repay us in surprise.
Sperry’s explanation was simple and profound. When you fixate on the cross in KEY + RING, the neural pathways from eye to brain send KEY only to the right hemisphere, and RING only to the left. If the corpus callosum is intact, the right hemisphere then tells the left about KEY, and the left tells the right about RING, so that the person sees KEY RING.
What false assumption bedevils our efforts to unravel the relation between brain and consciousness? I propose it is this: we see reality as it is.
::Perception is always relative to WII. WII creates the context and filter for our perception::
::Placebo as example of reality models making reality::
beauty is a perception of fitness payoffs on offer,
The predictions of evolution about beauty are surprising but, as we will see in chapter nine, its predictions about physical objects are disconcerting: objects, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder and inform us about fitness—not about objective reality.
micro-magnet |Common
to all eukaryotic cells, these filaments are primarily structural in
function and are an important component of the cytoskeleton, along with
microtubules and often the intermediate filaments. Microfilaments range
from 5 to 9 nanometers in diameter and are designed to bear large
amounts of tension. In association with myosin, microfilaments
help to generate the forces used in cellular contraction and basic cell
movements. The filaments also enable a dividing cell to pinch off into
two cells and are involved in amoeboid movements of certain types of
cells.
Microfilaments are solid rods made of a protein known as actin. When it is first produced by the cell, actin appears in a globular form (G-actin;
see Figure 1). In microfilaments, however, which are also often
referred to as actin filaments, long polymerized chains of the molecules
are intertwined in a helix, creating a filamentous form of the protein (F-actin).
All of the subunits that compose a microfilament are connected in such
a way that they have the same orientation. Due to this fact, each
microfilament exhibits polarity, the two ends of the filament
being distinctly different. This polarity affects the growth rate of
microfilaments, one end (termed the plus end) typically assembling and
disassembling faster than the other (the minus end).
Unlike microtubules, which typically extend out from the centrosome
of a cell, microfilaments are typically nucleated at the plasma
membrane. Therefore, the periphery (edges) of a cell generally contains
the highest concentration of microfilaments. A number of external
factors and a group of special proteins influence microfilament
characteristics, however, and enable them to make rapid changes if
needed, even if the filaments must be completely disassembled in one
region of the cell and reassembled somewhere else. When found directly
beneath the plasma membrane, microfilaments are considered part of the
cell cortex, which regulates the shape and movement of the cell's
surface. Consequently, microfilaments play a key role in development
of various cell surface projections (as illustrated in Figure 2),
including filopodia, lamellipodia, and stereocilia.
Illustrated
in Figure 2 is a fluorescence digital image of an Indian Muntjac deer
skin fibroblast cell stained with fluorescent probes targeting the
nucleus (blue) and the actin cytoskeletal network (green).
Individually, microfilaments are relatively flexible. In the cells of
living organisms, however, the actin filaments are usually organized
into larger, much stronger structures by various accessory proteins.
The exact structural form that a group of microfilaments assumes depends
on their primary function and the particular proteins that bind them
together. For instance, in the core of surface protrusions called microspikes, microfilaments are organized into tight parallel bundles by the bundling protein fimbrin. Bundles of the filaments are less tightly packed together, however, when they are bound by alpha-actinin
or are associated with fibroblast stress fibers (the parallel green
fibers in Figure 2). Notably, the microfilament connections created by
some cross-linking proteins result in a web-like network or gel form
rather than filament bundles.
Over the course of evolutionary history of the cell, actin has
remained relatively unchanged. This, along with the fact that all
eukaryotic cells heavily depend upon the integrity of their actin
filaments in order to be able to survive the many stresses they are
faced with in their environment, makes actin an excellent target for
organisms seeking to injure cells. Accordingly, many plants, which are
unable to physically avoid predators that might want to eat them or harm
them in some other way, produce toxins that affect cellular actin and
microfilaments as a defensive mechanism. The death cap mushroom, for
example, produces a substance called phalloidin that binds to and stabilizes actin filaments, which can be fatal to cells.
This book has been written by an anesthesiologist because of a confluence of two fascinations. The first is the nature of consciousness, which anesthesiologists routinely erase and restore in their patients. The second is a fifteen year trail of notions that would not go away. While a third year medical student in 1972, I spent a summer research elective in a cancer laboratory. For some reason I became fascinated and fixated by one particular question. When cells divided, the chromosomes were separated and daughter cell architecture established by wispy strands called mitotic spindles (“microtubules”) and cylindrical organelles called centrioles. Somehow, the centrioles and spindles “knew” when to move, where to go, and what to do. The uncanny guidance and orientation mechanism of these tiny biomolecular structures seemed to require some kind of motorized intelligence.
At about the same time, electron microscopy techniques were revealing the interior of all living cells to be densely filled with wispy strands, some of which were identical to mitotic spindles. Interconnected in dynamic parallel networks, these structures were thought to serve a purely supportive, or mechanical structural role and were collectively termed the “cytoskeleton.”
But several factors suggested that the cytoskeleton was more than the structural “bones” of the cell: they manipulated dynamic activities, orchestrating complex and highly efficient processes such as cell growth, mitosis and transport. Another factor was a lack of any other candidate for “real time” dynamic organization within cells. Long term blueprints and genetic information clearly resided in DNA and RNA, and membranes performed dynamic functions at cell surfaces. However, a mechanism for the moment to moment execution, organization, and activities within cells remained unknown.
Where was the nervous system within the cell? Was there a biological controller?
This book is based on the premise that the cytoskeleton is the cell’s nervous system, the biological controller/computer. In the brain this implies that the basic levels of cognition are within nerve cells, that cytoskeletal filaments are the roots of consciousness.
The small size and rapid conformational activities of cytoskeletal proteins are just beyond the resolution of current technologies, so their potential dynamics remain unexplored and a cytoskeletal controlling capability untested. Near future technologies will be able to function in the nanoscale (nano = 10-9; nanometer = one billionth meter, nanosecond = one billionth second and will hopefully resolve these questions. If indeed cytoskeletal dynamics are the texture of intracellular information processing, these same “nanotechnologies” should enable direct monitoring, decoding and interfacing between biological and technological information devices. This in turn could result in important biomedical applications and perhaps a merger of mind and machine: Ultimate Computing.
A thorough consideration of these ideas involves a number of disciplines, all of which are at least tangentially related to anesthesiology. These include biochemistry, cognitive science, computer science, engineering, mathematics, microbiology, molecular biology, pharmacology, philosophy, physics, physiology, and psychology. As an expert in none, but a dabbler in all, I hope true experts in these fields will find my efforts never-the-less interesting.
Starting from a cytoskeletal perspective, this book flings metaphors at the truth. Perhaps one or more will land on target, or at least come close.
vice | The
U.S. Navy says that releasing any additional UFO videos would “harm
national security” and told a government transparency website that all of the government’s UFO videos are classified information.
In
a Freedom of Information Act request response, the Navy told government
transparency site The Black Vault that any public dissemination of new
UFO videos “will harm national security as it may provide adversaries
valuable information regarding Department of Defense/Navy operations,
vulnerabilities, and/or capabilities. No portions of the videos can be
segregated for release.”
The
Black Vault was seeking all videos “with the designation of
‘unidentified aerial phenomena.’” This is an interesting response from
the Navy because, often, military agencies will issue a so-called GLOMAR response,
where they neither confirm nor deny that the records (in this case
videos) exist, and refuse to say anything more. In this response, the
Navy is admitting that it has more videos, and also gives a rationale for releasing three previous UFO videos.
“While
three UAP videos were released in the past, the facts specific to those
three videos are unique in that those videos were initially released
via unofficial channels before official release,” it said. “Those events
were discussed extensively in the public domain; in fact, major news
outlets conducted specials on these events. Given the amount of
information in the public domain regarding these encounters, it was
possible to release the files without further damage to national
security.”
It’s
true that the three videos—which were leaked to former Blink-182 singer
Tom DeLonge and the New York Times—didn’t originally come out via
official means. But in recent years, the Pentagon has regularly talked
about UFOs, and earlier this year it showed additional clips from UFOs to Congress.
The military has seemingly wanted to tell the public and Congress that
UFOs are very much real and a threat, and that it needs more funding to
determine what they are and, perhaps, protect us against them. But it
continues to hold the videos close to the vest.
BAR | Anyone paying attention knows that Joe Biden’s accomplishments as
president are pretty sparse. The oligarchy allowed his American Rescue
Plan stimulus program to go through but then put a stop on Build Back Better
or any other legislation that would help the people in a meaningful
way. The student loan debt relief plan is a bait and switch scam
used against desperate people. Biden brags about allowing Medicare to
negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies but that won’t
happen until 2026 and will only be allowed for ten drugs that are to be
named later.
What is a failed president to do? His 2022 midterm stump speech had the odd title,
“The Continued Battle for the Soul of a Nation.” No one voted for Biden
to be the nation’s religious leader, why the reference to the nation’s
soul? That use of language is a sure sign that nonsense is being peddled
and Biden didn’t disappoint. His failures are the reason he keeps
running against Donald Trump instead of in defense of himself.
Because he and the democrats don’t have much in the way of appeals to
voters he just shouts Trump’s signature acronym MAGA, Make America
Great Again, over and over again. He said MAGA 13 times in his speech.
Never before has a losing president or his supporters been elevated to
such a level of attention.
Of course Trump differs from most former presidents by claiming that
he didn’t really lose and encouraging his supporters to riot inside the
Capitol two weeks before his successor’s inauguration. He still says he
didn’t lose and is also back in the news after refusing to turn over
subpoenaed documents to the National Archives where they belong.
But Trump’s personal foolishness should be a reason for him to be
ignored instead of getting more attention. The MAGA distraction exposes
the democrats’ weakness, namely living off their decades old reputation
as the party of working people when they have had little or nothing to
say for themselves in that regard in the Biden, Obama, or Clinton
administrations.
The events of January 6, 2021 were definitely a shock to the public
at that time but a year and a half of endless news stories and
congressional investigations haven’t moved the needle of public opinion
very much. Approximately 40% of Americans would still vote for Trump.
The people calling Trump a traitor and wanting to jail him are the same
people who would never have voted for him or other republicans in the
first place. Trump received more than 70 million votes in November 2020,
10 million more than in his 2016 election. There is little reason to
believe that those supporters will change their minds. The democrats may
get lucky and keep control of congress after the midterm elections but
it won’t be because Biden manages to say MAGA in every sentence.
It is a political dictum that opponents should be attacked and not
voters. Hillary Clinton’s pre-election remark about “deplorables” didn’t
help her get out the vote in swing states where she most needed them.
Biden diverges from traditional political discourse out of desperation
so acute that he repeats Hillary’s failed course of action.
He is allowed to spew subpar propaganda because he has no opposition
within the democratic party. The so-called progressives stand down when
they are told to do so. They are window dressing within window dressing
who are allowed to post platitudes on Twitter and fool democrats into
thinking they have champions in congress. Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley
can even tell an obvious lie that Biden canceled
student loan debt and emerge unscathed. Neither she nor other members
of “the Squad” or the Congressional Black Caucus have anything to fear
when they go along to get along.
They would think twice about joining in the beat down if they feared
the voters. Unfortunately most democratic voters have been indoctrinated
into thinking that voicing any concerns with their party leadership
will lead to republican victory. Black voters are once again caught in
what they see as an insurmountable trap of defending democrats
regardless of what they do or fail to do.
mises | There are themes in the West that are difficult to question without
running the risk of receiving sharp criticism. For the following themes,
for example, there is a position considered “correct” by Western
collective opinion: “Welfare State,” “climate policy,” “multicultural
society,” or “covid-19 vaccination.” It is implied that the “acceptable”
position to each one of these themes can and should be adopted without
any prior critical analysis at the individual level.
The list of these themes is not static; new ones rise to prominence
in society, while others become less important over time. In recent
years two new themes have emerged: “authoritarian Russia” and “communist
China,” which is not surprising considering that Washington, and thus,
by extension. the West, has decided to treat these two nations as
strategic enemies. A recent study
shows, for example, that in a very short time the percentage of
Americans with a negative view of China increased dramatically, from 46
percent to 67 percent. This is not a coincidence, but the result of a
media communication strategy.
The Critique of the Antiwar Position
As far as Russia is concerned, the “correct” attitude to have in the
West, especially since the start of the Ukraine conflict on February 24,
2022, is no less than an absolute condemnation of that country. Support
for Ukraine must be comprehensive and can receive social confirmation
by a small blue and yellow flag on Facebook. Unconditional support for
the economic war waged by Western leaders against Russia is also
socially required for Europeans, even though they will be the first to
suffer from it.
It is for this reason that the Amnesty International report of August 4, 2022, which confirmed
that “Ukrainian forces putting civilians at risk and violating the laws
of war when they operate in populated areas” became a media bomb, not only in Ukraine but also in the West. This report disturbs
a lot of people because it is not in line with the black and white view
of Russia as a criminal aggressor and Ukraine as an innocent victim.
The people who do not take the “correct” stance on the conflict in
Ukraine are often accused of being “pro-Russian,” even when this stance
simply consists in being objective; by considering the recent history
and behavior of the various protagonists. They are considered
“pro-Russian” because they do not express unconditional support for
Ukraine, but more often, propose conditions for peace. Indeed, the
position of most of these critics is not at all “pro-Russian,” but
“pro-peace” by supporting active Western efforts to reach a ceasefire,
thus sparing as many Ukrainian lives as possible.
Western media did not react when, on July 14, 2022, the Ukrainian government published
a black list of Western politicians, academics, and activists who,
according to Kiev, “promote Russian propaganda.” This list includes
leading Western intellectuals and politicians, such as Republican
Senator Rand Paul, former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, military and geopolitical analyst Edward N. Luttwak, the political realist John Mearsheimer, and award-winning freelance journalist Glenn Greenwald.
Though this Ukrainian blacklist should obviously have been condemned
in the West, it has hardly elicited any reactions at all, because the
Western media already agree with its conclusion: the people on the list
are already criticized in their own countries for not adopting
the pro-Ukrainian position. Moreover, would the Ukrainian government
have dared to publish such a list if it had not had the prior agreement
of Washington?
The Formation of the Collective Opinion
What is happening in the case of the attitude toward Russia, as well
as in the other themes mentioned above, is not surprising or new. In his
famous work, On Liberty
(1859), John Stuart Mill is perhaps today best known for his prescient
early warning of the dangers of the “collective opinion”; the “tyranny
of the majority” in the form of “the dominant opinions and feelings that
society is trying to impose” on a minority.
Society’s majority is naturally intolerant of nonconformism, because
thinking like everyone else gives psychological comfort and strengthens
social ties. Yet, though society depends on collective opinion for its
social cohesion, paradoxically it also depends for its well-being on
views that run counter to this majority opinion. Just as natural science
progresses only through the sometimes tortuous but generally respectful
process of peer review, society also needs minority opinions and
dissident voices to curb the permanent search for consensus on the part
of the majority.
zerohedge | A Senate bill is raising fears among some for its potential to enable Big Tech and mainstream media outlets to collude against smaller and independent media outlets.
The bill, dubbed the Journalism Competition and Protection Act (JCPA), would supersede some existing antitrust laws and allow media companies to band together to negotiate with Big Tech platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter.
Specifically, the JCPA says:
“A news
content creator may not be held liable under the antitrust laws for
engaging in negotiations with any other news content creator during the
4-year period beginning on the date of enactment of this Act to
collectively withhold content from, or negotiate with, an online content
distributor regarding the terms on which the news content of the news
content creator may be distributed by the online content distributor.”
In
brief, this means that online and print media outlets, including some
of the largest and longest-established names in the industry, could band
together in a kind of media union to demand concessions from tech
companies in order for the coalition to continue to allow their content
on the platform. Under existing antitrust laws, such cartels—which
describe a collusion of firms in an industry to join together for a
common financial or industry outcome—are decidedly illegal.
Proponents
of the JCPA have presented it as a much-needed panacea to address
dwindling numbers of dedicated local media companies who, proponents
say, are often left behind in the umbrella of Big Tech algorithms and
advertising capacity.
In a change.org petition that
has garnered over 23,000 signatures, the News Media Alliance, one of
the most outspoken supporters of the bill, explained this position,
presenting it as a hardline position against the reach of big tech power
and influence.
“Today, many local
newspapers are struggling to stay in business. Big Tech platforms, such
as Facebook and Google, control how we access trustworthy news online
and how journalism is displayed, prioritized, and monetized. They
capture the vast majority of all digital advertising dollars because of
their outsized ability to collect consumer data.
“Local
newspaper revenues have gone down and as a result, thousands of
journalists have been laid off, ‘news deserts’ are emerging across the
country, and dangerous misinformation that threatens the fabric of our
democracy continues to flourish.”
But
opponents of the bill have raised alarm bells, warning that in practice
the policy will only serve to benefit established legacy and mainstream
outlets, to the exclusion of anti-establishment, independent
publications.
Specifically, opponents point to a section
of an updated draft of the JCPA that could effectively permit legacy
media cartels to demand that tech platforms censor or outright refuse to
permit newer, less-established media outlets from publishing on the
platform.
DW | Putin accused the West of attempting to "subordinate" Russia with
sanctions during a speech at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok.
He also announced new deals with China and Myanmar regarding gas and
oil.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has admitted some sectors of the Russian economy
are suffering due to sanctions and political pressure, which he
referred to as the "economic, financial and technological aggression of
the West," but remained bullish on building new ties with Asia.
Putin made the comments in a landmark speech at the Eastern Economic Forum in the far east city of Vladivostok on Wednesday.
"Other challenges of a global nature that threaten the whole world have replaced the pandemic," the Russian president said.
"I
am speaking of the West's sanctions fever, with its brazen, aggressive
attempt to impose models of behavior on other countries, to deprive them
of their sovereignty and subordinate them to their will."
However, Putin added: "No matter how much someone would like to isolate Russia, it is impossible to do this."
Grain shipments under threat
During his speech, Putin said said Russia had been "grossly swindled" by a grain shipping deal that was reached with Ukraine in July. The deal, brokered by Turkey and the UN, was intended to shield the world's most vulnerable people from a looming food crisis.
The Russian president claimed only two out of 87 ships went to poor
countries, and said Russia had been unable to resume lucrative
fertilizer exports which had been promised as part of the deal. Putin
said he would now consider limiting the destinations for grain exports
under the agreement.
Ukrainian authorities hit back later on
Wenesday, with presidential advisor Mykhailo Podolyak calling Putin's
proposal "unexpected" and "groundless."
"The agreements signed in
Istanbul ... concern only one issue, and that is the transfer of cargo
ships through the Black Sea," Podolyak told Reuters.
"Russia can't dictate where Ukraine should send its grain, and Ukraine doesn't dictate the same to Russia."
Putin
said Russia would renege on energy contracts if the Group of Seven (G7)
countries imposed a price cap on Russian oil, threatening to cut the
flow of gas to Europe.
"Will there be any political decisions
that contradict the contracts? Yes, we just won't fulfil them. We will
not supply anything at all if it contradicts our interests," Putin said.
"We will not supply gas, oil, coal, heating oil — we will not supply
anything."
Hours after Putin's comments, European Commission
President Ursula von der Leyen told reporters: "We will propose a price
cap on Russian gas... We must cut Russia's revenues which Putin uses to
finance this atrocious war in Ukraine."
thetimes | Police forces are
braced for a rise in crime, a breakdown in public order and even
corruption in their ranks this winter as they draw up emergency
proposals to deal with the cost of living crisis.
Contingency
planning among police chiefs is under way to deal with the fallout that
could result from millions of households falling into financial
difficulties.
A
leaked national strategy paper, drawn up by them this summer, has
revealed they are increasingly concerned that “economic turmoil and
financial instability” has “potential to drive increases in particular
crime types”.
These
include “acquisitive” offences, such as shoplifting, burglary and
vehicle theft, as well as online fraud and blackmail, and crimes that
“rely on exploiting financial vulnerability”.
At a regional level, some police forces are preparing for more children to be sucked into county lines drug gangs and women falling victim to sexual exploitation. Priti Patel, the home secretary, is understood to share their concern.
One
chief constable has said that their force has already noticed an
increase in some offences and has stepped up preparations in response.
The higher price cap on household energy bills, £3,549, comes into force
on October 1.
Drawn
up with input from the National Police Chiefs’ Council, the document
goes on to say that “a more complex and unpredictable risk is the chance
of greater civil unrest, as a response to prolonged and painful
economic pressure”.
A
senior officer at one force in the north of England told a local MP
that without significant government intervention they feared a return to
the febrile conditions that led to the London riots in 2011.
The
document says: “Greater financial vulnerability may expose some staff
to higher risk of corruption, especially among those who fall into
significant debt or financial difficulties.” It offers a glimpse of the
stark choices facing the new prime minister, expected to be Liz Truss,
when they take office on Tuesday. It can also be revealed:
•Truss will make a “very short” speech to the country on Tuesday making clear that she understands the pain caused by rising energy bills and offering an “immediate” package of support for families, before getting cabinet approval for the plans on Wednesday.
scheerpost | There is a fatal disconnect between a political
system that promises democratic equality and freedom while carrying out
socioeconomic injustices that result in grotesque income inequality and
political stagnation.
Decades in the making, this disconnect has extinguished American
democracy. The steady stripping away of economic and political power was
ignored by a hyperventilating press that thundered against the
barbarians at the gate — Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban,
ISIS, Vladimir Putin — while ignoring the barbarians in our midst. The
slow-motion coup is over. Corporations and the billionaire class have
won. There are no institutions, including the press, an electoral system
that is little more than legalized bribery, the imperial presidency,
the courts or the penal system, that can be defined as democratic. Only
the fiction of democracy remains.
The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin in Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism calls
our system “inverted totalitarianism.” The façade of democratic
institutions and the rhetoric, symbols and iconography of state power
have not changed. The Constitution remains a sacred document. The U.S.
continues to posit itself as a champion of opportunity, freedom, human
rights and civil liberties, even as half the country struggles at
subsistence level, militarized police gun down and imprison the poor
with impunity, and the primary business of the state is war.
This collective self-delusion masks who we have become — a nation
where the citizenry has been stripped of economic and political power
and where the brutal militarism we practice overseas is practiced at
home.
In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi Germany or Stalin’s
Soviet Union, economics was subordinate to politics. But under inverted
totalitarianism, the reverse is true. There is no attempt, unlike
fascism and state socialism, to address the needs of the poor. Rather,
the poorer and more vulnerable you are, the more you are exploited,
thrust into a hellish debt peonage from which there is no escape. Social
services, from education to health care, are anemic, nonexistent or
privatized to gouge the impoverished. Further ravaged by 8.5 percent inflation, wages have decelerated sharply since 1979. Jobs often do not offer benefits or security.
globalresearch |Maliciously smearing approximately half of the country as
existential terrorist-inclined threats to “the soul of the nation” is
nothing but the crudest Machiavellian means of dividing and ruling the
population.
The Unprecedentedly Dangerous Divider-In-Chief
US President Joe Biden’s nationally televised speech on Thursday that the official White House website
headlined as being about “the continued battle for the soul of the
nation” saw the incumbent become the most dangerous and divisive
American leader in history. Far from trying to cleanse and protect that
very same soul, he shamelessly spit on it by pitting his people against
one another as part of an obvious divide-and-rule plot ahead of the
neck-and-neck midterm elections that are only two months away.
Debunking Biden’s False Belief In Equality & Democracy
The first part that stands out is Biden emphasizing how the location
of his speech, Philadelphia’s Independence Hall where the Declaration of
Independence was made and the Constitution signed, reinforces the
mutually complementary concepts of equality and democracy connected with
those two documents. He doesn’t truly believe in either of those though
as proven by White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre condemning all minority views as “extremist” earlier that same day.
Nevertheless, he pretended that he’s a true believer in them in order
to artificially manufacture the basis upon which to contrast himself
with former US President Donald Trump. Biden claimed that his predecessor and those who still support his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement supposedly “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” Falsely framing them as existential threats so close to the midterms is obviously aimed at manipulating voters’ perceptions.
Applying The “Rules For Radicals” Against The MAGA Movement
This crude tactic would be condemned by the American Government if it
was employed by any Global South leader irrespective of whether it’s
baseless like in Biden’s case or genuinely backed up by facts. Biden
then channeled the infamous Saul Alinksy’s “Rules For Radicals”,
specifically the thirteenth rule to “Pick the target, freeze it,
personalize it, and polarize it”, when claiming that “the Republican
Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and
the MAGA Republicans”.
By adding that “that is a threat to this country”, the incumbent
ominously implied that the full authority of the state will be brought
down to bear on those who are even simply suspected of being remotely
connected to the former president or his movement on faux national
security pretexts. He then instantly reverted to gaslighting once again
just like he earlier did by unconvincingly claiming that he supports the
Founding Fathers’ vision of equality and democracy by contrasting
Democrats and MAGA on false bases.
Who Really Employs Political Violence & Election Conspiracy Theories?
The same man who represents the party that frenziedly fanned the flames of the joint Antifa- and BLM-ledHybrid War of Terror on America all throughout summer 2020, whose countless antagonists were manipulated into functioning as “useful idiots” of the anti-MAGA faction of the US “deep state”
(permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies),
counterfactually claimed that it’s Trump and his supporters who divided
the country through the use of violence for political ends.
Biden also insulted Americans’ intelligence by gaslighting that it’s
only some MAGA folks who’ve ever rejected the outcome of a presidential
election when most Democrats refused to recognize the legitimacy of
Trump’s victory in 2016. Not only that, but their anti-MAGA “deep state”
puppeteers literally concocted the Russiagate conspiracy theory that
they laundered through allied congressional representatives, law
enforcement, media, and NGOs to discredit the entirety of his four years
in office.
imetatronink |this war has reached the
stage equivalent to Nazi Germany in mid-January 1945: the war is lost; everyone
knows it is lost, and all that remains is the positioning in advance of the
inevitable surrender, the unrestrained looting, and the occasional harassment
of the never-say-die snipers who will fight to their last round of ammo and
last drop of blood.
In other words, we’ve finally
arrived at the most dangerous juncture of this conflict.
You see, as I have frequently
observed, this war, at its deepest root, has always been an existential
struggle between Russia and the rapidly declining fortunes and dominion of the
long-since irredeemably corrupted American Empire.
Beginning with the fall of the
Soviet Union, and continuing throughout the 1990s, the western vulture
capitalists raced to divide, conquer, and despoil the unfathomable natural resource
wealth of the former USSR. And indeed, in ten short years, they managed to extract
a massive pile of treasure at Russia’s expense, only to be prematurely thwarted
by the unforeseen rise of the previously obscure Vladimir Putin.
At first, the finely accoutered
locusts believed they could manipulate Putin as easily as they had his
immediate predecessors. But they were soon disabused of that fallacy. So then they
began to pressure Putin and Russia by methodically assimilating into their “defensive
alliance” all the previously unaligned nations that stood between NATO’s 1997
borders and the Russian frontier.
This, of course, awakened in
Russia a sober sense of their increasingly precarious position, and in 2007, at
the Munich Security Conference, Putin delivered a landmark speech wherein he put the Empire on notice that Russia was drawing a line
in the sand beyond which it would not permit further NATO expansion. That line
extended from eastern Poland to northern Armenia.
Predictably, Putin’s declarations
were first mocked and then summarily dismissed.
I suspect this was the point at which
Russia came to see that war was very likely inevitable in order to retain its
sovereignty and security.
Nevertheless, Putin exhibited extraordinary
patience. While initiating an aggressive military upgrade and expansion
program, he bided his time for the next several years.
But with the threat to Russia’s strategic
naval base in Syria and the US-orchestrated coup d’etat in Ukraine, he
was compelled to act, albeit with considerable restraint, to alter the
trajectory of events. He dispatched an expeditionary force to Syria to prevent
the fall of the Assad regime at the hands of US-supported “moderate rebels”; he
moved to reclaim historically Russian Crimea, and to much more aggressively support
the ethnic Russian separatists in the Donbass region of Ukraine who were waging
a tenuously balanced civil war against the US-installed regime in Kiev.
American designs in Syria were
foiled. But the ongoing de facto NATO assimilation of Ukraine continued,
as the US and its NATO allies set out to methodically construct what would eventually
become the most formidable proxy army in history, with ambitions to lure Putin
into a Slavic civil war that would sap Russian strength, mortally wound its
still-fragile economy, and induce social unrest within Russia and discontent
among its various loci of domestic power, and ultimately effect “regime change”
in the Kremlin.
But, at every juncture, Putin
out-maneuvered them.
Meanwhile, the decades-long
superiority of Russian missile technology produced for Putin several trump
cards in the form of long-range stand-off weapons capable of threatening prime
US military assets virtually anywhere on the planet.
Armed with this “ace in the hole”,
Putin’s negotiation posture was significantly fortified, and from 2018 onward
he began to articulate much more forcefully that Russia would not abide any
further NATO expansion towards its borders – most explicitly in the case
of Ukraine, where the ambitious training and outfitting of a NATO proxy army
continued apace.
dailyveracity | Captagon is a drug that first came to prominence during the Islamic State’s terror wave throughout the middle east. Since 2014, the drug reportedly reemerged
within Ukraine, fueling neo-nazi terrorists who have used the meth-like
substance on the battlefield to overcome the fear of death, becoming
what some people call “zombie soldiers.”
The Donetsk People Republic (DPR) recently uncovered drug
laboratories where ‘combat drugs’ have reportedly been developed ii
village of Sopino near Mariupol, and administered to the Azov
Battalion. Sputnik reported.
DNR-Kräfte fanden Labors in der Nähe von Mariupol, in denen
"Kriegs"-Drogen für ukrainische Nationalisten hergestellt wurden,
berichtet RIA Novosti pic.twitter.com/PjZuDfPfSW
“You start taking him somewhere, and they’re laughing. They don’t
feel anything, no pain or anything. They’re like zombies.” describes a
Donbas soldier.
A DPR soldier alleged that the drugs, which are a combination of
Captagon, as well as other amphetamines, cause “stupidity and courage”
among the Ukrainian neo-nazis who are said to lose all fear of death
when taking the substance.
Some of the neo-nazis who were high on the drug, admitted to killing
fellow Ukrainian citizens, saying “I understood that I was shooting at
civilians, but I was high on drugs, I was following orders”
Captagon, before being banned throughout the western world, was first
manufactured in 1961 as an alternative to amphetamine and
methamphetamine—used at the time to treat narcolepsy, fatigue, and the
behavioral disorder “minimal brain dysfunction.”
Since, the illegal manufacturing of the substance exploded throughout
eastern Europe and the Middle East, and is said to have fueled ISIS
throughout their terror campaign across the middle east.
The ‘Combat Drug’ has since become a staple for the Neo-Nazi Azov
Battalion, who is said to manufacture the substance and administer it to
combatants who then are said to stay up for days without fatigue.
The Azov soldiers have gone through Ukraine, torturing, beating, and
killing Ukrainian civilians. It has been reported that the Ukrainian
soldiers have killed their own, indiscriminately, while laughing and
cheering.
Newsweek | In the past three months, investigators across Europe have
intercepted thousands of Captagon pills, an amphetamine-based drug
popular with the Islamic State militant group. Nicknamed "the jihadists'
drug," Captagon keeps users awake for long periods of time, dulls pain
and creates a sense of euphoria. According to one former militant who spoke to CNN
in 2014, ISIS "gave us drugs, hallucinogenic pills that would make you
go to battle not caring if you live or die." Given similar testimony
from other fighters, experts say it seems likely that the hallucinogenic
pills the militant took were Captagon.
Invented in Germany in the
1960s to treat attention and sleep disorders, and highly addictive,
Captagon was banned throughout most of the world in the 1980s.
On
May 10, Dutch investigators said they had discovered a drug lab the
previous month that was churning out Captagon pills, and they were
looking for two suspects associated with the lab. In March, Greek police
confiscated more than 600,000 Captagon pills in a raid and arrested
four people for allegedly manufacturing the drug.
Greek and Dutch police haven't said the Captagon stashes they found were destined for ISIS fighters.
Captagon is one of the brand names for the drug fenethylline, a combination of amphetamine and theophylline
that relaxes the muscle around the lungs and is used to treat breathing
problems. A German company first synthesized fenethylline in 1961, and
when it discovered the drug improved alertness, doctors began
prescribing it to treat narcolepsy and attention deficit hyperactivity
disorder. Though generally without side effects, says Dr. Raj Persaud, a
fellow at the London-based Royal College of Psychiatrists, overuse can
cause extreme depression, tiredness, insomnia, heart palpitations and,
in rare cases, blindness and heart attacks. In the 1980s, when the
drug's addictiveness became clear, the United States and the World
Health Organization listed it as a controlled substance, and it is now
illegal to buy and sell throughout most of the world.
Nevertheless,
fenethylline remains popular in the Middle East, particularly in Saudi
Arabia, where more Captagon is consumed than in any other country in the
world.
Though Islamic law forbids the consumption of alcohol and other drugs,
many users there see Captagon as a medicinal substance. In October 2015,
Lebanese authorities arrested a Saudi prince at the Beirut airport
after two tons of cocaine and Captagon pills, which sell for roughly $20
per pill in Saudi Arabia, were found on a private plane.
Once manufactured in Eastern Europe, Turkey and Lebanon, according to Columbia University's Journal of International Affairs,
Captagon is now predominantly made in Syria. The Syrian conflict has
allowed for illicit activities to flourish, and many fighters there know
the benefits of using the drug.
The use of drugs in war has a
long history. The ancient Greeks, the Vikings, U.S. Civil War soldiers
and the Nazis all relied on drugs—wine, mushrooms, morphine and
methamphetamines, respectively—to get them through the horror of battle.
"The holy grail that armies around the world have been looking for is a
drug that gives people courage," says Persaud, and Captagon comes
close. "It doesn't give you distilled courage, but it gives you a
tendency to want to keep going and impaired judgment, so you don't
consider whether you're scared or not," he says. "You feel euphoria. You
don't feel pain. You could say it's courage without the judgment." For a
fighter in a war so brutally waged, the benefits of that are clear.
marketwatch | As European governments struggle to contain the fallout of soaring energy costs
to their citizens, the U.S. may also be facing a brewing crisis with an
estimated 20 million households struggling to pay their utility bills.
Representing
one in six households, the eye-popping number comes from a study at
the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (Neada) that was
highlighted in a Bloomberg report
earlier this week. The total amount in arrears amounted to $16 billion
in June, just under the highest number so far this year — $16.5 billion
in March.
“So before the pandemic, it was about $8 billion…and then the number doubled,” the author of that study, Neada’s executive director Mark Wolfe, told MarketWatch on Thursday.
Those
20 million households — largely low-income — can be anywhere from 30 to
90 days in arrears on utility payments, said Wolfe, who has been
tracking the data for about 10 years.
Jean Su, a senior attorney
at the Center for Biological Diversity, which tracks utility
disconnections across the U.S. told Bloomberg that she expects a
“tsunami of shutoffs.”
The rise in the cost of living was at a 40-year-high at 8.5% in July
compared to the year before. Grocery prices continued to soar — the
price increase was 13.1% compared to the same period last year. Many
Americans reported they have already dipped into savings to pay for bills and bought smaller package sizes and cheaper alternatives to cut down on costs.
Because
of the rising costs, lower-income Americans are already struggling to
pay back credit-card loans and purchase big-ticket items like
automobiles, Radha Seshagiri told MarketWatch previously.
Seshagiri is the public policy and system change director at SaverLife,
a nonprofit that helps families with low and moderate incomes to save
money.
Residents living in rural areas were seeing even bigger impacts of inflation and the recent rise in energy costs, according to a report by Iowa State University professor Dave Peters, which studied the impact of inflation in small towns.
“The
biggest inflationary impact on rural households has been the increased
cost of transportation, which is essential in rural areas where
residents have to drive longer distances to work, school, or to shop for
daily needs.” Peters wrote in the report.
Rural people are
paying $2,470 per year more for gasoline and diesel fuels than they did
two years ago, while urban dwellers are paying $2,057 more, according to
the report.
indianpunchline | The US media vaguely claims that Ukrainian forces are making
“tactical gains” and are preparing “for a long and hard-fought battle
before winter sets in… Western officials cautioned the counteroffensive
won’t sweep the Russian forces out of Ukraine any time soon. However,
success in retaking the region of Kherson and gaining control of the
western side of the river would be “really significant.” (Politico)
The
daily noted, “Such a victory would show Ukraine’s Western allies that
they are right to continue sending billions of dollars of weapons and
supplies to help counter Russia.”
This
last bit is the crux of the matter. The arms supplies from European
countries to Ukraine have virtually dried up to a trickle and a similar
trend is discernible with the US supplies too. The Biden Administration
is asking Congress to approve another $11.7 billion in aid for Ukraine
but that is in anticipation of the likelihood that the 2023 budget may
not be passed by the deadline of Oct. 1. The White House Office of
Management and Budget announcement on Sept. 2 acknowledges that this is
“a short-term continuing resolution to keep the Federal government
running.”
The OMB
statement says the White House wants this anomaly because funds from
previous packages to boost Ukrainian military are running low, with
three-quarters distributed or committed, and more will follow in the
next month. Importantly, though, of the $11.7 billion requested by the
White House, $4.5 billion would go toward replenishing Pentagon’s
depleted stockpiles, $4.5 billion to budgetary support for Ukraine’s
government, and only $2.7 billion to defence and intelligence aid as
such. This new round of aid is intended to last through December.
Zelensky
must be a worried man. He needs to convince the US that such massive
multi-billion dollar military aid has been worth it. He should show at
the very least, a bloody stalemate on the southern warfront. (Russia is
gaining the upper hand in Donass already.)
There is always the danger that Zelensky might overreach. Politico disclosed:
“Western governments have warned Kyiv against spreading its forces too
thinly in a bid to capture as much territory as possible, since the
Ukrainians would have to hold any gains they make. The officials said
they expect Ukraine to reassess its military goals if it retakes
Kherson. However, the city of Melitopol, also in the south, remains too
far away from the Ukrainian positions, while a ground attack against
Crimea during this offensive is not plausible.”
Now, all this juxtaposes with the upbeat tone but bare factual information shared in the official Russian statements on Kherson front. OtherRussian
reports say that the “counteroffensive” has been virtually muzzled and
Ukrainian forces have taken heavy casualties running into several
thousands. It seems to be an apocalyptic scenario , too tragic to
recount.
The solitary
Ukrainian breakthrough remaining as of Saturday night was a bridgehead
across the Ingulets river — the so-called Andreevsky bridgehead. There
is speculation that Russians may have lured the Ukrainian troops into a
“fire trap.” The river crossings have been cut off and Russians are
probably encircling the Ukrainian troops trapped on the western side of
Ingulets with no supplies or reinforcements reaching them.
The
counteroffensive has lost its bite and is now turning into positional
battles on one or two sites in the Mykolaiv-Krivoy Rog direction. A
Russian counterattack has also been mentioned to the effect that the
frontline now touches the “administrative boundary” of Mykolaiv region
(which is a crucial city en route to Odessa.) Heavy bombardment of
Mykolaiv city has also been reported. The Russians claim to have
destroyed vast quantities of weaponry.
Russia’s
“domain control” can be put in perspective: the enemy is, on the one
hand, caught on the bare steppe and cut down with the overwhelming
superiority of Russian artillery and aviation, and, on the other hand,
encountering well-fortified, entrenched defence lines.
That
said, Zelensky cannot give up, as he is desperately in need of a
success story. Kiev still hopes to reverse the situation, but how that
is achievable remains to be seen.
Against
this sombre backdrop, more and more sceptical voices are being heard in
the US about the Biden Administration’s policy trajectory. The latest
is an opinion piece in Wall Street Journal
by Gen. (Retd) Mark Kimmitt, formerly Assistant Secretary of State for
Political-Military Affairs in the Bush administration. Kimmitt predicts
that “a breakthrough is unlikely” and soon, “logistics shortfalls” may
force a change in US strategy.
Head of UN mission to #Zaporozhye thanks the Russian Federation for keeping his team safe from attacks from Zelensky regime forces, who tried to stop the inspection team from reaching the plant.
"I'm glad the Russian military did what they had to do to keep our inspectors safe," pic.twitter.com/TUtsbupSAg
sonar21 | The title sums it up in a nutshell. The intelligence services of the
U.K. and the United States put together a plan and directed Ukraine to
carry it out–i.e., capture the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant from the
Russians on the very day that UN Inspectors were scheduled to arrive.
This was a highly coordinated operation. (See Andrei Martyanov’s piece
on U.S. role in planning the Kherson offensive.) For example, David
Ignatius, a reliable shill for the CIA, wrote a piece in the Washington
Post–Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Is More Than Just Bravado. His
cheerleading for Ukraine is no mere coincidence on the same day that the
Ukrainian Army gambled and lost at Zaporizhzhia (warning, this is behind a firewall):
As Ukraine mounts a new
counteroffensive in the southern part of the country, Zelensky’s bravado
risks setting expectations too high. In truth, Ukraine probably won’t
liberate its territory this year, or even next. Still, as Ukrainian
forces push toward the Black Sea coast, Zelensky is delivering a defiant
response to President Vladimir Putin’s claim that Ukraine is not a real
country. Not only can Ukraine survive, it also can regain some of its
occupied land.
The best defense is a good offense, as military
strategists have argued for centuries. And if Ukraine’s drive toward the
coast succeeds, it will restore the country’s economic viability by
relieving pressure on its port city of Odessa. Moreover, it could
threaten Russia’s occupation of Crimea by cutting into the land bridge
that connects to the Russian-controlled Donbas region in the east.
The Ukrainian attempt to capture the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant
consisted of two river crossings–1: seven speed boats carrying up to
60s that landed 3 kilometers northeast of the ZNP and 2: two barges
launched several miles south of the ZNP manned by Ukrainian airborne
forces.
On the morning of September 1, the
Kiev regime attempted a major provocation to disrupt the arrival of
IAEA expert working group at Zaporozhye nuclear power plant.
At
6:20 a.m., seven fast-moving motorboats landed on the coast of
Kakhovskoye reservoir, three kilometres northeast of Zaporozhye NPP,
with two sabotage groups of up to 60 people in total.
The
sabotage groups were detected and blocked in the drop-off area by
Russian National Guard units guarding the territory of Zaporozhye NPP.
A
unit of the Russian Armed Forces and helicopters of the army aviation
arrived to reinforce Russian Guard troops in order to suppress an
attempt to enter the nuclear power plant and destroy Ukrainian
saboteurs.
At about 7:00 a.m., units of the Russian Armed Forces prevented another attempted landing to seize a nuclear power plant.
A
few kilometres from Zaporozhye NPP near Vodyanoye, an attempt was made
to land a tactical airborne assault by AFU two self-propelled barges
from Nikopol. Two self-propelled barges carrying tactical airborne
assault of AFU are sunk as a result of the Russian Armed Forces’
shelling.
As of 8:00 a.m., the Kiev regime has blocked the passage of IAEA expert mission from controlled territory to Zaporozhye NPP.
Ukrainian
artillery is shelling the territory of Zaporozhye NPP, the meeting
place of IAEA mission with Russian specialists near Vasil’evka, as well
as the route of their movement to Energodar. Four shells exploded 400
metres from the 1st unit of Zaporozhye NPP.
If Ukraine had pulled this off it would have been a major black eye
for the Russians and would have put the nuclear plant back in Ukrainian
hands. It would have marked the first serious victory in this war for
Ukraine. If, if, if. There is an old saying, “If ifs and buts were candy
and nuts it would be Christmas every day.” Christmas did not come for
Ukraine. They got their ass handed to them.
9/29 again
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