sathishramyen | Every
scholar knows the Vaimanika Shastra, a collection of sketches the core
of which is attributed to Bharatvaj the Wise around the 4th century B.C.
The writings in the Vaimanika Shastra were rediscovered in 1875. The
text deals with the size and the most important parts of the various
flying machines. We learn how they steered, what special precautions had
to be taken on long flights, how the machines could be protected
against violent storms and lightning, how to make a forced landing and
even how to switch the drive to solar energy to make the fuel go
further. Bharatvaj refers to no fewer than 70 authorities and ten
experts of Indian air travel in antiquity! The description of
these machines in old Indian texts are amazingly precise. The difficulty
we are faced with today is basically that the texts mention various
metals and alloys which we cannot translate. We do not know what our
ancestors understood by them. In the Amarangasutradhara five flying
machines were originally built for the gods Brahma, Vishnu, Yama, Kuvera
and Indra. Later there were some additions.
Four
main types of flying Vimanas are described: Rukma, Sundara, Tripura and
Sakuna. The Rukma were conical in shape and dyed gold, whereas the
Sundata were like rockets and had a silver sheen. The Tripura were
three-storeyed and the Sakuna looked like birds. There were 113
subdivisions of these four main types that differed only in minor
details. The position and functioning of the solar energy collectors are
described in the Vaimanika Shastra. It says that eight tubes had to be
made of special glass absorbing the sun’s ray. A whole series of details
are listed, some of which we do not understand. The
Amaranganasutradhara even explains the drive, the controls and the fuel
for the flying machine. It says that quicksilver and ‘Rasa’ were used.
Unfortunately we do not yet know what “Rasa’ was. Ten sections deal
with uncannily topical themes such as pilot training, flight paths, the
individual parts of flying machines, as well as clothing for pilots and
passengers, and the food recommended for long flights. There was much
technical detail: the metals used, heat-absorbing metals and their
melting point, the propulsion units and various types of flying
machines. The information about metals used in construction name three
sorts, somala, soundaalika and mourthwika. If they were mixed in the
right proportions, the result was 16 kinds of heat-absorbing metals with
names like ushnambhara, ushnapaa, raajaamlatrit, etc. which cannot be
translated into English. The texts also explained how to clean metals,
the acids such as lemon or apple to be used and the correct mixture, the
right oils to work with and the correct temperature for them.
Seven
types of engine are described with the special functions for which they
are suited and the altitudes at which they work best. The catalogue is
not short of data about the size of the machines, which had storeys, nor
of their suitability for various purposes. This text is
recommended to all who doubt the existence of flying machines in
antiquity. The mindless cry that there were no such things would have to
fall silent in shame.
globalaffairs.ru | Russia and its leadership seem to be facing a difficult choice. It
becomes increasingly clear that a clash with the West cannot end even if
we win a partial or even a crushing victory in Ukraine.
It will be a really partial victory if we liberate four regions. It
will be a slightly bigger victory if we liberate the entire East and
South of present-day Ukraine in the next year or two. But there will
still remain a part of it with an even more embittered ultranationalist
population pumped up with weapons―a bleeding wound threatening
inevitable complications and a new war.
Perhaps the worst situation may occur if, at the cost of enormous
losses, we liberate the whole of Ukraine and remain in ruins with a
population that mostly hates us. Its “redemption” will take more than a
decade. Any option, especially the latter one, will distract our country
from making an urgently needed step to shift its spiritual, economic,
and military-political focus to the east of Eurasia. We will get stuck
in the west, with no prospects in the foreseeable future, while
present-day Ukraine, primarily its central and western regions, will sap
managerial, human, and financial resources out the country. These
regions were heavily subsidized even in Soviet times. The feud with the
West will continue as it will support a low-grade guerrilla civil war.
A more attractive option would be liberating and reincorporating the
East and the South of Ukraine, and forcing the rest to surrender,
followed by complete demilitarization and the creation of a friendly
buffer state. But this would be possible only if and when we are able to
break the West’s will to incite and support the Kiev junta, and to
force it to retreat strategically.
And this brings us to the most important but almost undiscussed
issue. The underlying, and even fundamental cause of the conflict in
Ukraine and many other tensions in the world, as well as of the overall
growth of the threat of war is the accelerating failure of the modern
ruling Western elites―mainly comprador ones in Europe (Portuguese
colonialists used the word ‘comprador’ to refer to local traders who
catered to their needs)―who were generated by the globalization course
of recent decades. This failure is accompanied by rapid changes,
unprecedented in history, in the global balance of power in favor of the
Global Majority, with China and partly India acting as its economic
drivers, and Russia chosen by history to be its military-strategic
pillar. This weakening infuriates not only the imperial-cosmopolitan
elites (Biden and Co.), but also the imperial-national ones (Trump).
Their countries are losing their five-century-long ability to syphon
wealth around the world, imposing, primarily by brute force, political
and economic orders, and cultural dominance. So there will be no quick
end to the unfolding Western defensive but aggressive confrontation.
This collapse of moral, political, and economic positions has been
brewing since the mid-1960s; it was interrupted by the Soviet Union’s
breakup but resumed with renewed vigor in the 2000s. (The defeat in Iraq
and Afghanistan, and the beginning of the Western economic model crisis
in 2008 were major milestones.)
To stop this snowballing downward slide, the West has temporarily
consolidated itself. The United States has turned Ukraine into a
striking fist intended to create a crisis and thus tie the hands of
Russia―the military-political core of the non-Western world, which is
freeing itself from the shackles of neo-colonialism―but better still
blow it up, thus radically weakening the rising alternative
superpower―China. For our part, we delayed our preemptive strike either
because we misunderstood the inevitability of a clash, or because we
were gathering strength. Moreover, following modern, mainly Western,
military-political thought, we thoughtlessly set too high a threshold
for the use of nuclear weapons, inaccurately assessed the situation in
Ukraine, and did not start the military operation there successfully
enough.
Failing internally, Western elites began to actively nourish the
weeds that had come through after seventy years of well-being, satiety,
and peace―all these anti-human ideologies that reject the family,
homeland, history, love between a man and a woman, faith, commitment to
higher ideals, everything that constitutes the essence of man. They are
weeding out those who resist. The goal is to destroy their societies and
turn people into mankurts (slaves deprived of reason and sense
of history as described be the great Kirgiz and Russian writer Chengiz
Aitmatov) in order to reduce their ability to resist modern “globalist”
capitalism, increasingly unfair and counterproductive for humans and
humanity as a whole.
Along the way, the weakened United States unleashed a conflict to
finish off Europe and other dependent countries, intending to throw them
into the flames of confrontation after Ukraine. Local elites in most of
these countries have lost their bearings and, panic-stricken by their
failing internal and external positions, are obediently leading their
countries to the slaughter. Moreover, the feeling of a greater failure,
powerlessness, centuries-old Russophobia, intellectual degradation, and
the loss of strategic culture make their hatred even deeper than that of
the United States.
thedebrief | A former intelligence official turned whistleblower has given
Congress and the Intelligence Community Inspector General extensive
classified information about deeply covert programs that he says possess
retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin.
The information, he says, has been illegally withheld from Congress, and he filed a complaint alleging that he suffered illegalretaliation for his confidential disclosures, reported here for the first time.
Other intelligence officials, both active and
retired, with knowledge of these programs through their work in various
agencies, have independently provided similar, corroborating
information, both on and off the record.
Thewhistleblower, David Charles Grusch, 36, a
decorated former combat officer in Afghanistan, is a veteran of the
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National
Reconnaissance Office (NRO). He served as the reconnaissance office’s
representative to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force from
2019-2021. From late 2021 to July 2022, he was the NGA’s co-lead for UAP
analysis and its representative to the task force.
The task force was established to investigate what were once called “unidentified flying objects,” or UFOs, and are now officially called “unidentified
anomalous phenomena,” or UAP. The task force was led by the Department
of the Navy under the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for
Intelligence and Security. It has since been reorganized and expanded
into the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office to include investigations
of objects operating underwater.
Grusch said the recoveries of partial fragments through and up to intact vehicles have been made for decades
through the present day by the government, its allies, and defense
contractors. Analysis has determined that the objects retrieved are “of
exotic origin (non-human intelligence, whether extraterrestrial or
unknown origin) based on the vehicle morphologies and material science
testing and the possession of unique atomic arrangements and
radiological signatures,” he said.
In filing his complaint, Grusch is represented by a
lawyer who served as the original Intelligence Community Inspector
General (ICIG).
“We are not talking about prosaic origins or
identities,” Grusch said, referencing information he provided Congress
and the current ICIG. “The material includes intact and partially intact
vehicles.”
In accordance with protocols, Grusch provided the
Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review at the Department
of Defense with the information he intended to disclose to us. His
on-the-record statements were all “cleared for open publication” on
April 4 and 6, 2023, in documents provided to us.
Grusch’s disclosures,and
those of non-public witnesses, under new protective provisions of the
latest defense appropriations bill, signal a growing determination by
some in the government to unravel a colossal enigma with national
security implications that has bedeviled the military and tantalized the
public going back to World War II and beyond. For many decades, the Air
Force carried out a disinformation campaign to discredit reported
sightings of unexplained objects. Now, with two public hearings and many
classified briefings under its belt, Congress is pressing for answers.
Karl E.Nell, a recently retired Army Colonel and current aerospace executive who was the Army’s liaison for the UAP Task Force from 2021 to 2022 and worked with Grusch there, characterizes Grusch as “beyond reproach.”
err.ee | "Whataboutism" is not just a feature of Russian rhetoric. The U.S.
invasion of Iraq universally undercut U.S. credibility and continues to
do so. For many critics of the United States, Iraq was the most recent
in a series of American sins stretching back to Vietnam and the
precursor of current events. Even though a tiny handful of states have
sided with Russia in successive UN resolutions in the General Assembly,
significant abstentions, including by China and India, signal
displeasure with the United States. As a result, the vital twin tasks of
restoring the prohibition against war and the use of force as the
critical cornerstone of the United Nations and international system, and
of defending Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, get lost
in a morass of skepticism and suspicions about the United States.
In
the so-called "Global South," and what I am loosely referring to as the
"Rest" (of the world), there is no sense of the U.S. as a virtuous
state. Perceptions of American hubris and hypocrisy are
widespread. Trust in the international system(s) that the U.S. helped
invent and has presided over since World War II is long gone. Elites
and populations in many of these countries believe that the system was
imposed on them at a time of weakness when they were only just securing
their independence. Even if elites and populations have generally
benefitted from pax Americana, they believe the United States and its
bloc of countries in the collective West have benefitted far more. For
them, this war is about protecting the West's benefits and hegemony, not
defending Ukraine.
Russian
false narratives about its invasion of Ukraine and about the U.S.
resonate and take root globally because they fall on this fertile soil.
Russia's disinformation seems more like information—it comports with
"the facts" as others seem them. Non-Western elites share the same
belief as some Western analysts that Russia was provoked or pushed into
war by the United States and NATO expansion. They resent the power of
the U.S. dollar and Washington's frequent punitive use of financial
sanctions. They were not consulted by the U.S. on this round of
sanctions against Russia. They see Western sanctions constraining their
energy and food supplies and pushing up prices. They blame Russia's
Black Sea blockade and deliberate disruption of global grain exports on
the United States—not on the actual perpetrator, Vladimir Putin. They
point out that no-one pushed to sanction the United States when it
invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq, even though they were opposed to U.S.
intervention, so why should they step up now?
Countries in the
Global South's resistance to U.S. and European appeals for solidarity on
Ukraine are an open rebellion. This is a mutiny against what they see
as the collective West dominating the international discourse and
foisting its problems on everyone else, while brushing aside their
priorities on climate change compensation, economic development, and
debt relief. The Rest feel constantly marginalized in world affairs. Why
in fact are they labeled (as I am reflecting here in this speech) the
"Global South," having previously been called the Third World or the
Developing World? Why are they even the "Rest" of the world? They are
the world, representing 6.5 billion people. Our terminology reeks of
colonialism.
The
Cold War era non-aligned movement has reemerged if it ever went away.
At present, this is less a cohesive movement than a desire for distance,
to be left out of the European mess around Ukraine. But it is also a
very clear negative reaction to the American propensity for defining the
global order and forcing countries to take sides. As one Indian
interlocutor recently exclaimed about Ukraine: "this is your conflict! …
We have other pressing matters, our own issues … We are in our own
lands on our own sides … Where are you when things go wrong for us?"
Most
countries—including many in Europe—reject the current U.S. framing of a
new "Great Power Competition"—a geopolitical tug-of-war between the
United States and China. States and elites bristle at the U.S. idea that
"you are either with us or against us," or you are "on the right or
wrong side of history" in an epic struggle of democracies versus
autocracies. Few outside Europe accept this definition of the war in
Ukraine or the geopolitical stakes. They don't want to be assigned to
new blocs that are artificially imposed, and no-one wants to be caught
in a titanic clash between the United States and China. In contrast to
the U.S., as well as others like Japan, South Korea and India, most
countries do not see China as a direct military or security threat. They
may have serious qualms about China's rough economic and political
behavior and its blatant abuse of human rights, but they still see
China's value as a trading and investment partner for their future
development. The United States and the European Union don't offer
sufficient alternatives for countries to turn away from China, including
in the security realm—and even within Europe the sense of how much is
at stake for individual countries in the larger international system and
in relations with China varies.
Outside Europe, the interest in
new regional orders is more pronounced. In this context, the
BRICS—which, for its members offers an alternative to the G7 and the
G20—is now attractive to others. Nineteen countries, including Saudi
Arabia and Iran, purportedly showed interested in joining the
organization ahead of its recent April 2023 summit. Countries see the
BRICS (and other similar entities like the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization or SCO) as offering flexible diplomatic arrangements and
possible new strategic alliances as well as different trade
opportunities beyond the United States and Europe. BRICS members and
aspirants, however, have very disparate interests. We need to consider
these as we look ahead to finding a resolution to the war in Ukraine and
as we consider the kinds of structures and networks we will have to
deal with in the future.
I am going to run through some of the factors that are most relevant to thinking about Ukraine in the BRICS context.
seymourhersh |
The Ukraine government, headed by Volodymyr Zelensky, has been using
American taxpayers’ funds to pay dearly for the vitally needed diesel
fuel that is keeping the Ukrainian army on the move in its war with
Russia. It is unknown how much the Zalensky government is paying per
gallon for the fuel, but the Pentagon was paying as much as $400 per
gallon to transport gasoline from a port in Pakistan, via truck or
parachute, into Afghanistan during the decades-long American war there.
What also is unknown is that Zalensky has been buying the fuel from
Russia, the country with which it, and Washington, are at war, and the
Ukrainian president and many in his entourage have been skimming untold
millions from the American dollars earmarked for diesel fuel payments.
One estimate by analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency put the
embezzled funds at $400 million last year, at least; another expert
compared the level of corruption in Kiev as approaching that of the
Afghan war, “although there will be no professional audit reports
emerging from the Ukraine.”
“Zelensky’s been buying discount diesel from the Russians,” one
knowledgeable American intelligence official told me. “And who’s paying
for the gas and oil? We are. Putin and his oligarchs are making
millions” on it.
Many government ministries in Kiev have been literally “competing,” I
was told, to set up front companies for export contracts for weapons
and ammunition with private arms dealers around the world, all of which
provide kickbacks. Many of those companies are in Poland and Czechia,
but others are thought to exist in the Persian Gulf and Israel. “I
wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are others in places like the
Cayman Islands and Panama, and there are lots of Americans involved,” an
American expert on international trade told me.
The issue of corruption was directly raised with Zelensky in a
meeting last January in Kiev with CIA Director William Burns. His
message to the Ukrainian president, I was told by an intelligence
official with direct knowledge of the meeting, was out of a 1950s mob
movie. The senior generals and government officials in Kiev were angry
at what they saw as Zelensky’s greed, so Burns told the Ukrainian
president, because “he was taking a larger share of the skim money than
was going to the generals.”
Burns also presented Zelensky with a list of thirty-five generals and
senior officials whose corruption was known to the CIA and others in
the American government. Zelensky responded to the American pressure ten
days later by publicly dismissing ten of the most ostentatious
officials on the list and doing little else. “The ten he got rid of were
brazenly bragging about the money they had—driving around Kiev in their
new Mercedes,” the intelligence official told me.
Zelensky’s half-hearted response and the White House’s lack of
concern was seen, the intelligence official added, as another sign of a
lack of leadership that is leading to a “total breakdown” of trust
between the White House and some elements of the intelligence community.
Another divisive issue, I have been repeatedly told in my recent
reporting, is the strident ideology and lack of political skill shown by
Secretary of State Tony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake
Sullivan. The president and his two main foreign policy advisers “live
in different worlds” than the experienced diplomats and military and
intelligence officers assigned to the White House;. “They have no
experience, judgment, and moral integrity. They just tell lies, make up
stories. Diplomatic deniability is something else,” the intelligence
official said. “That has to be done.”
A prominent retired American diplomat who strenuously opposes Biden’s
foreign policy toward China and Russia depicted Blinken as little more
than a “jumped-up congressional staffer” and Sullivan as “a political
campaign manager” who suddenly find themselves front and center in the
world of high-powered diplomacy “with no empathy for the opposition.
They’re decent pols,” he added, “but now we have the political and
energy world all upside down. China and India are now selling refined
gasoline to the Western world. It’s just business.”
The current crisis is not helped by the fact that Putin also is
acting irrationally. The intelligence official told me that everything
Putin has been “doing in Ukraine is counter to Russia’s long-term
interests. Emotion has overcome rationality and he’s doing things that
are totally nonproductive. And so are we going to sit down with Zelensky
and Putin and work it out? Not a chance.”
“There is a total breakdown between the White House leadership and
the intelligence community,” the intelligence official said. The rift
dates back to the fall, when, as I reported in early February, Biden
ordered the covertdestruction of the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic
Sea. “Destroying the Nord Stream pipelines was never discussed, or even
known in advance, by the community,” the official told me. “And there
is no strategy for ending the war. The US spent two years planning for
the Normandy invasion in World War II. What are we going to do if China
decides to invade Taiwan?” The official added that the National
Intelligence Council has yet to order a National Intelligence Estimate
(NIE) on defending Taiwan from China, which would provide national
security and political guidance in case such does happen. There is no
reason yet, despite repeated American political provocation from both
Democrats and Republicans, the official said, to suspect that China has
any intention of invading Taiwan. It has lost billions building its
wildly ambitious Belt and Road Initiative aimed at linking East Asia to
Europe and investing, perhaps foolishly, in seaports around the world.
“The point is,” the official told me, “there is no working NIE process
anymore.
“Burns is not the problem,” the official said. “The problem is Biden
and his principal lieutenants—Blinken and Sullivan and their court of
worshippers—who see those who criticize Zelensky as being pro-Putin. ‘We
are against evil. Ukraine will fight ’til the last military shell is
gone, and still fight.’ And here’s Biden who is telling America that
we’re going to fight as long as it takes.”
The official cited the little-known and rarely discussed deployment,
authorized by Biden, of two brigades with thousands of America’s best
army combat units to the region. A brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division
has been intensively training and exercising from its base inside
Poland within a few miles of the Ukrainian border. It was reinforced
late last year by a brigade from the 101st Airborne Division that was
deployed in Romania. The actual manpower of the two brigades, when
administrative and support units—with the trucks and drivers who haul
the constant stream of arms and military equipment flowing by sea to
keep the units combat ready—could total more than 20,000.
The intelligence officials told me that “there is no evidence that
any senior official in the White House really knows what’s going on in
the 82nd and 101st. Are they there as part of a NATO exercise or to
serve with NATO combat units if the West decides to engage Russians
units inside Ukraine? Are they there to train or to be a trigger? The
rules of engagement say they can’t attack Russians unless our boys are
getting attacked.”
“But the juniors are running the show here,” the official added.
“There’s no NSC coordination and the US army is getting ready to go to
war. There’s no idea whether the White House knows what’s going on. Has
the president gone to the American people with an informative broadcast
about what is going on? The only briefings the press and the public get
today are from White House spokespeople.
“This is not just bad leadership. There is none. Zero.” The official
added that a team of Ukrainian combat pilots are now getting trained
here in America to fly US-built F-16 fighter jets, with the goal, if
needed, of flying in combat against Russian troops and other targets
inside Ukraine.” No decision about such deployment has been made.
The clearest statements of American policy have come not from the
White House, but from the Pentagon. Army General Mark A. Milley, who is
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said of the war last March 15:
“Russia remains isolated. Their military stocks are rapidly depleting.
Their soldiers are demoralized, untrained, unmotivated conscripts and
convicts, and their leadership is failing them. Having already failed in
their strategic objectives, Russia is increasingly relying on other
countries, such as Iran and North Korea. . . . This relationship is
built on the cruel bonds of repressing freedom, subverting liberty and
maintaining their tyranny. . . . Ukraine remains strong. They are
capable and trained. Ukrainian soldiers are . . . strong in their combat
units. Their tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and armored vehicles are
only going to bolster the front line.”
There is evidence that Milley is as optimistic as he sounds. I was
told that two months ago the Joint Chiefs had ordered members of the
staff—the military phrase is “tasked”—to draft an end-of-war treaty to
present to the Russians after their defeat on the Ukraine battlefield.
If worse comes to worst for the undermanned and outgunned Ukraine
army in the next few months, will the two American brigades join forces
with NATO troops and face off with the Russian army inside Ukraine? Is
this the plan, or hope, of the American president? Is this the fireside
chat he wants to give? If Biden decides to share his thoughts with the
American people, he might want to explain what two army brigades, fully
staffed and supplied, are doing so close to the war zone.
sputnikglobe | The appearance online of what looks like secret documents concerning US intelligence assessments of the conflict in Ukraine and their proliferation by media have sparked widespread controversy, with observers divided into two broad camps: those who believe the docs are genuine, and those who have reservations. Here’s what we know right now.
The leak of over 100 photographed pages of documents dated between late February and early March and labeled “Secret,” “Top Secret,” and “NOFORN” (not for viewing by foreign nationals) related to the ongoing NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine continues to generate global headlines. It has also had a real world impact, with Washington officials scrambling to contact and reassure allies amid embarrassing revelations that the US has been spying on its own allies (although, of course, that’s nothing new to anyone who’s been paying attention).
Key Takeaways As the dust settles and the potential security implications of the leaks (including, potentially, the judiciousness of further US and NATO military assistance to Kiev), several facts seem to stand out among the info gleaned.
1. A page from a “Top Secret” assessment from February highlights apparent major “force generation and sustainment shortfalls” within Ukraine’s Armed Forces, and warns that Kiev would be able to secure only “modest territorial gains” if it decided to launch a spring offensive.
The assessment is significant because it highlights the contrast between the glum internal appraisal by the Pentagon, and the gung ho, everything-is-awesome sentiment expressed by officials in Washington and Brussels, and by President Joe Biden’s brash talk of Kiev’s impressive capabilities to conduct large-scale offensive operations with US support.
The information also raises questions about just where the tens of billions of dollars in US and NATO security assistance to Kiev has gone, given growing concerns about Western weapons sent to Ukraine somehow popping up in the hands of European gangs and African and Middle Eastern rebels and terrorist groups, while the dollar value of arms deliveries to Ukraine comes close to matching Russia’s entire annual defense budget.2. Another significant document, also dating from February, highlights President Volodymyr Zelensky’s recommendation that Ukrainian forces carry out massed drone strikes against “Russian deployment locations in Russia’s Rostov Oblast,” and complaints that Kiev does not have the necessary long-range missile capabilities for such strikes.This piece of info is significant because it highlights President Zelensky’s apparent desperation and readiness to attack Russia directly despite warnings by some of his NATO paymasters that doing so might undermine their support for Kiev.3. The leaks challenge longstanding claims by the Pentagon and the Ukrainian military about casualties. A document entitled “Top Secret – Status of the Conflict as of March 01, 2023” estimates total Russian losses could be up to 16,000-17,500 killed in action, and 61,000-71,500 on the Ukrainian side.
That’s a far cry from the assessment by Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley in November, which estimated Russian deaths at “well over” 100,000 troops, as well as the Ukrainian military’s pie in the sky “eliminated personnel” figures of 180,050 (i.e. nearly matching the 190,000 troop total that Western intelligence estimated were near Donbass in February 2022 before the escalation of the crisis).
Ukrainian officials and Western media have sought to downplay these figures, accusing Russia of “doctoring” the stats (despite possible secondary corroboration) and assuring that Russian casualties are much higher, and Ukrainian ones much lower. Wherever the truth lies, the figures serve to undermine confidence in Ukraine’s NATO-supported and equipped army of super soldiers.
4. Another key revelation relates to the extent of NATO involvement. While alliance officials have consistently assured that no Western forces are on the ground fighting against Russia, a “Top Secret” document dated March 23 indicates that nearly half-a-dozen NATO powers do in fact have “boots on the ground” in the form of special forces troops. These include Britain (50 troops), Latvia (17), France (15), the US (14), and the Netherlands (1).
It’s unclear what exactly these forces are doing there. The document doesn’t say. Apparently realizing the grave implications of this information, Britain’s Defense Ministry offered a catch-all dismissal of the documents, assuring in a Tweet Tuesday that “the widely reported leak of alleged classified US information has demonstrated a serious level of inaccuracy,” and that “readers should be cautious about taking at face value allegations that have the potential to spread disinformation.”
What’s significant about the NATO troops on the ground in Ukraine? Well, for one thing, they serve to confirm longstanding allegations made by senior Russian officials including President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that the US and its allies are waging a “total war” against Russia. Moreover, it raises important questions about the dangerous potential future of proxy wars. How, for example, would the US react if Russia or China deployed special forces troops to fight NATO forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, or Yugoslavia? The presence of Western alliance forces in Ukraine has effectively opened that can of worms.5. One final significant piece of information that can be gleaned from the documents relates to the state of Ukraine’s air defenses. A Pentagon assessment dated February 28 projected that Kiev’s stocks of Soviet-made Buk and S-300 missile systems – which make up almost 90 percent of the country’s air defenses, would be “fully depleted” by mid-April and May 3, respectively. A second slide from an assessment from February 23 predicts that Ukrainian forces’ frontline protection would be “completely reduced” by May 23.
This information is significant because it seems to confirm that the US and its allies are running out of time to shore up their client’s air defense protection before Russia gains total air superiority similar to the kind its Air Force enjoyed in the counterterrorism operation in Syria, or the kind the US and its allies typically have when they decide to bomb a third world country.
The US has promised to provide Ukraine with its bulky Patriot missile system and to ramp up deliveries of other anti-air weaponry, but observers have expressed concerns about the ability of the US military-industrial complex to ramp up production quickly enough, and questioned whether Washington will be willing to send additional sophisticated air defense hardware to a conflict zone where losses would mean a significant hit to US weapons makers if the equipment is lost.
Skepticism is Healthy The leak of the documents online, and the fact that they were picked up by major legacy media resources in the West, has caused understandable consternation in some circles about whether or not they are genuine. After all, these are the same newspapers, outlets, and television networks that have pumped out story after debunked Russia-related story over the years and decades, from the claim that Russia paid bounties to the Taliban to kill US troops in Afghanistan, to the allegation that Moscow meddled in America’s elections in 2016 and secretly installed a “Manchurian Candidate” named Donald Trump.
“We don’t have a position,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told Sputnik when asked about the leaks. “Maybe it’s a fake, deliberate misinformation.”
Ryabkov explained that since Washington is a key party to the Ukraine conflict and is waging a hybrid war against Russia, the documents may be a ploy to mislead the Russian side. “I’m not confirming anything, but understand that various scenarios are conceivable here,” he said.
Publicly, at least, officials in Washington have treated the leaks as if they’re the real thing. Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin vowed that his department would “turn over every rock” until the “source” of the leaks was found and their extent clarified. CIA chief William Burns echoed Austin’s performance, calling the leaks “deeply unfortunate” and saying they were something the US government “takes extremely seriously.”
Amid reports that the Pentagon has been trying to scrub the leaked docs from the net, Twitter CEO Elon Musk sarcastically quipped that “yeah, you can totally delete things from the internet – it works perfectly and doesn’t draw attention to whatever you were trying to hide at all.”
Kiev, predictably, has blamed Moscow, calling the leaks a “Russian propaganda ploy.” Chinese media dismissed these assertions, suggesting that if Russia had gotten its hands on the documents, it would likely hold onto them and use them to its advantage against Ukraine and NATO instead of spreading them online.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the leaks “quite interesting.” As for the suggestion that Moscow might somehow be involved, he said that “the tendency to constantly blame Russia for everything is a widespread disease right now.”
The truth about who leaked the documents and why may never be found. However, a stream of retired US officials, Washington-based security advisors, and CIA analysts have told Sputnik that the “leaks” may be an attempt by “dissenters” and “realists” within the US security state establishment to provide Washington with a much-needed “offramp” from the ever-escalating conflict with Russia in Ukraine before it turns into a world war.
counterpunch | In his book The Great Delusion[5],
Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago elucidated
principles of international order and the necessity to respect
agreements (pacta sunt servanda), including oral agreements. In his article in the Economist on 19 March 2022[6],
Mearsheimer explains why the West bears responsibility for the
Ukrainian crisis. Already in 2015 Mearsheimer had signalled the
importance of keeping oral agreements, as those given by the United
States to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989-91, to the effect that NATO would
not expand eastward[7].
In subsequent lectures Mearsheimer has explained that, whether of not
the West considers NATO’s expansion a provocation, what is crucial is
how NATO expansion is perceived by those who feel threatened by it. In
this context we must remember that article 2(4) of the UN Charter
prohibits not only the use of force but also the threat of the
use of force. Promising to expand NATO to the very borders of Russia
and the massive weaponization of Ukraine certainly constitute such a
threat, especially bearing in mind the aggressive campaigns by NATO
members in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Lybia.
For decades Russian Presidents Vladimir
Putin and Dmitry Medvedev have been warning the West – notably at the
2007 Munich Security Conference[8]
— that NATO eastward expansion constitutes an existential menace to
Russia. Both Presidents advocate a European security architecture that
will take into account the national security concerns of all countries,
including Russia. Whether Russian fears are objectively justified or not
(I think they are) is not the pertinent question, since their
apprehension is a factum. What is crucial is the obligation of
all UN member states to settle their differences by peaceful means,
i.e. to negotiate in good faith. That is precisely what the Minsk
agreements were all about. Yet, Ukraine violated the Minsk agreements
systematically. Russia did make a credible effort to negotiate since
2014 in the context of the OSCE and the Normandy Format. German
Chancellor Angela Merkel[9] and French President François Hollande[10]
recently confirmed that the Minsk agreements were intended to give
Ukraine time to prepare for war. Thus, essentially, the West entered
the agreements in bad faith by deliberately deceiving the Donbas
Russians. In a very real sense, Putin was taken for a ride at Minsk and
during the eight years of Normandy Format discussions. Such behavior
reflects a “culture of cheating”[11]
and violates well-established principles of international relations
amounting to perfidy, in contravention of the UN Charter and general
principles of law. Notwithstanding, In December 2021 the Russians put
forward two peaceful proposals in the hope of averting military
confrontation. Although the treaty proposals were moderate and
pragmatic, the US and NATO refused to negotiate pursuant to article 2(3)
of the Charter and arrogantly rejected them. If this was not a
provocation in contravention of article 2(4) of the UN Charter, I do not
know what is.
Professor Wittner is right in reminding us
of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 and the 1997 Treaty of Friendship,
Cooperation and Partnership, but these instruments have to be placed in
legal and historical context, in particular in the context of Western
pronouncements since 2008 to bring Ukraine into NATO, an issue that in
no way was foreseen in the two instruments above.
Without the Maidan Putsch and the
anti-Russian measures immediately taken by the Putsch-regime, the
Crimean and Donbass peoples would not have felt menaced and would not
have insisted on their right of self-determination. Wittner errs when
he uses the term “annexation” to refer to the reincorporation of Crimea
into Russia. “Annexation” in international law presupposes an invasion,
military occupation contrary to the will of the people. That is not
what happened in Crimea in March 2014. First there was a referendum to
which the UN and OSCE were invited – and never came. Then there was an
unilateral declaration of independence by the legitimate Crimean
Parliamen, only then was there an official request to be re-incorporated
into Russia, a request that went through the due process mill, being
first approved by the Duma, then by the Constitutional Court of Russia,
and only then signed by Putin. Had a referendum been held in 1994, when
I was in Crimea, the results would surely have been similar. A
referendum today would confirm the will of the Crimeans to be part of
Russia, not Ukraine, to which they had been artificially attached by
decision of Nikita Khruschev, a Ukrainian himself. There are no
historical or ethnic reasons justifying Crimea’s attachment to the
Ukraine. Many international lawyers agree that Crimea exercised its
right of self-determination and was not “annexed” by Russia[15].
WaPo | Fifty years ago, in early 1973, with U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War coming to a close, the Nixon administration announced the end
of draft call-ups. The armed forces, which had been dependent on
conscripts since 1940, had to become an all-volunteer force (AVF)
overnight.
America
gained — and lost — a great deal in that wrenching transition: We
gained a more effective military but opened up a new divide between
service personnel and civilians.
Admittedly,
it was hard to predict either consequence when the draft ended. By
1973, conscription had caused enormous discontent in U.S. society
because so many of the well-off had been able to escape the Vietnam War
with occupational or student deferments or bogus medical excuses.
Military
leaders feared that few high-quality recruits would join voluntarily —
and initially they were right. As recounted by James Kitfield in his
book “Prodigal Soldiers: How the Generation of Officers Born of Vietnam Revolutionized the American Style of War,”
“On standard military aptitude tests between 1977 and 1980, close to
half of all the Army’s male recruits scored in the lowest mental
category the service allowed. Thirty-eight percent were high school
dropouts.” Drug abuse and racial tensions were rife. The all-volunteer
force, combined with defense budget cuts, was producing a “hollow Army,” the Army chief of staff warned in 1980.
That
changed in the 1980s when patriotism surged and popular culture began
to depict the military in a more positive light — we went from “The Deer Hunter” (1978) to “Top Gun”
(1986). Congress raised pay and benefits, and the services figured out
how to attract recruits with slogans such as “Be All You Can Be.” By
1990, 97 percent of Army recruits were high school graduates and, thanks
to mandatory drug testing, the number using illicit drugs plummeted.
The
AVF went on to win the 1991 Gulf War and perform capably in a long
series of conflicts that followed. The United States often did not
achieve its political objectives (as in Afghanistan), but it wasn’t the
fault of those doing the fighting. They turned the military into the
most admired institution in U.S. society.
Now,
however, one retired general told me, “The AVF is facing its most
serious crisis since Nixon created it.” All of the services are
struggling with recruiting. The crisis has been especially acute in the
Army. Last year, it missed its recruiting goals by 15,000 soldiers
— an entire division’s worth. That is a particularly ominous
development given the growing threats from China, Russia, Iran and North
Korea.
Military analysts point to numerous factors to account for the recruiting shortfall, the biggest being that the unemployment rate is at its lowest level since 1969. There is also widespread obesity and drug use among young people. Only 23 percent
of Americans are eligible to serve, and even fewer are interested in
serving. More than two decades after Sept. 11, 2001, and nearly two
years after the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan, war weariness has set in.
Perceived politicization is another issue: While many right-wingers view the armed forces as too “woke,” many progressive Gen Zers view them as too conservative. The Ronald Reagan Institute
found that the number of people expressing a great deal of trust and
confidence in the military declined from 70 percent in 2017 to 48
percent in 2022.
Those
poll numbers reflect a concern among many in the military that the AVF
has created a dangerous chasm between the few who serve and the vast
majority who don’t. The number of veterans in the population
declined from 18 percent in 1980 to about 7 percent in 2018 — and it
keeps falling, as the older generation of draftees dies off.
“The
AVF has led us to become the best trained, equipped and organized
fighting force in global history,” retired Adm. James Stavridis, a
former NATO commander, told me. “But we have drifted away from the
citizen-soldier model that was such a part of our nation’s history. The
AVF has helped to create an essentially professional cadre of warriors.
We need to work to ensure that our military remains fully connected to
the civilian world, and to educate civilians about the military.”
The
easiest way to bridge the civil-military divide would be to reinstate
the draft, but there is no support for such a radical step in either the
military or the country at large. David S.C. Chu,
a former undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, points
out that relying on draftees “creates morale and discipline problems”
and is “increasingly inconsistent with a highly technological approach
to warfare.” In most countries, conscripts serve only a year or two at
most — barely long enough to master complex weapons systems. That’s why
most nations, including Russia and China, have been relying more on
professional soldiers like the United States does.
Yet,
while we gained a more capable military with the advent of the AVF, we
have to recognize that we also lost something important when the draft
ended. Mass mobilization during World War II broke down religious,
regional and ethnic barriers and paved the way for postwar progress on
civil rights and an expansion of the federal government to address
problems such as poverty. In the post-draft era, America has become
increasingly polarized between “red” and “blue” communities.
That has led to renewed interest in expanding national service programs such as AmeriCorps; President Biden, for example, recently proposed creating a new Civilian Climate Corps.
Congress should support such initiatives, but we shouldn’t have
extravagant expectations for what they can accomplish. The young people
who sign up for voluntary service are so civic-minded already that they
are the ones in least need of what these programs teach.
To
make a real difference, national service would have to be obligatory.
Retired Gen. Charles C. Krulak, a former Marine commandant, told me he
favors requiring every high school graduate to put in two years of
community service out of state while living on current or former
military bases.
He
is undoubtedly right that such a program would produce young adults
“better prepared to become useful citizens.” But there is no national
emergency that would justify such a mobilization and no agreement on how
we could usefully employ 12 million people (the
number of Americans aged 18 to 20). Public employee unions would be
sure to object, the cost would be prohibitive, and many would try to
evade the service requirement. Obligatory national service is no more
likely, in today’s climate, than a renewal of military conscription.
The likelihood is that the AVF can overcome its current problems with some tweaks such as a new Army program for pre-basic training
to condition out-of-shape recruits. Presumably, once the unemployment
rate rises, the military’s recruitment woes will ease. Bridging the
fissures that divide our society will be much harder to achieve. I wish a
national-service mandate were practical and possible, but it’s not. We
will have to look elsewhere — for example, to expanded civics education — for solutions.
Nobody’s blackmailing Biden to escalate in Ukraine. Ukraine has been his project going back to 2008 (and his time on the Senate Intelligence Committee likely pushes it further back). Ukraine is his personal project. His favorites from the Clinton State Department that assisted him back then all got nice promotions in his administration. The whole reason he ran in 2020 was to execute the Ukraine plan because Trump had messed it up and nobody in the field was going to be reliable enough to really run with it. Old Cornpop's a violent and angry man. He wanted more war in Yugoslavia, he was all in on Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the Spring he was publicly talking about bringing down Putin as well as informing enlisted soldiers in Poland that they’d be in Ukraine soon. If anything, people are holding Joe back. Consider the documents could be used to get Joe out of the way because Ukraine can’t be wound down as long as he’s POTUS. Per his autobiography, as a freshman senator in the mid 70s, he was introduced to the opportunities of southeast Europe by his mentor, Averell Harriman.
amgreatness |Biden and his allies have continued their vendetta against Trump, exposing his tax returns andraiding his home
for possessing documents he supposedly owed the National Archives. This
did not go over as well as Attorney General (and all-around hack)
Merrick Garland anticipated, and it seemsGarland and theJanuary 6 Committee have each decided to scale back their demands.
This is why the recent exposure of top secretdocuments in Biden’s old office, his garage, and a mysteriousthird location
suggests something is afoot. We went from a Monday disclosure to a
special counsel being appointed on Thursday. Nothing like this happens
this quickly unless it is by design.
There are, of course, ways to deal
with this situation that do not involve public exposure. Couldn’t Biden
or his staff order some FBI agents or White House people to pick them up
and take them to wherever they’re supposed to be stored?
It’s in the news because somehow his lawyers found the documents and reported them
before the story could go through White House channels. And, lawyers
being lawyers, they followed the street-lawyer rule that if someone has
to go to jail, make sure it’s your client and not you. Concerned about
individual culpability for obstruction or mishandling documents, they
made this hot potato someone else’s problem as fast as possible.
Someone is responsible for the way
this information came out, and that someone is an enemy of Biden. There
are plenty of possibilities: some secret Republicans at the Justice
Department, Kamala Harris and her people, a committee of Democratic
Party insiders concerned about Dementia Joe being president for another
four years. The whole thing has a whiff of a conspiracy, and, like the
various allegations and pretexts employed to investigate Trump, it may
very well originate in the intelligence community.
As Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) oncesaid,
“You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday
at getting back at you.” In this instance, the hypothesis is not
completely satisfying. Biden has not really taken on the intelligence
community, so far as I can tell, unless they’re still smarting about how
he ended the Afghanistan boondoggle.
CNN cuts away from Speaker McCarthy's press conference when he starts hammering Rep. Swalwell for being allegedly compromised, and Rep. Schiff for repeatedly lying about having evidence of collusion. pic.twitter.com/fL5xcblNI1
trendingpolitics | On Thursday while speaking with reporters, Speaker of the House Kevin
McCarthy left reporters speechless after he defended his decision to
keep California Democrats Eric Swalwell and Adam Schiff off of the House
Intelligence Committee.
“If you got the briefing I got from the FBI, you wouldn’t
have Swalwell on any committee,” McCarthy said, leaving reporters
silent.
This suggests damning bombshell information about Swalwell’s handlings that we will hopefully learn in the coming weeks.
“And you’re going to tell me other Democrats couldn’t fill that slot?
He cannot get a security clearance in the private sector,” McCarthy
said. “So would you like to give him a government clearance?”
McCarthy went on to explain that the last Congress lead by Nancy
Pelosi kept Swalwell on the committee even though they were aware of the
massive red flag from the FBI.
“You’re going to tell me there are 200 other Democrats that couldn’t
fill that slot, but they kept him on it? The only way that they even
knew it came forward is when they put to nominate him to the Intel
committee. And then the FBI came and told the leadership that he’s got a
problem, and they kept him on. That jeopardized all of us,” McCarthy
said.
McCarthy also name dropped Schiff.
“Adam Schiff openly lied to the American public. He told you he had
proof. He told you he didn’t know the whistle blower,” McCarthy said
while referring to false claims made by the California Democrat against
former President Donald Trump.
“He put America for four years through an impeachment that he knew
was a lie.” At the same time, we had Ukraine, the same time we had
Afghanistan collapse. Was that the role of the Intel committee? No,”
McCarthy said.
“So what I am doing with the Intel committee, bringing it back to the
jurisdiction is supposed to do forward looking to keep this country
safe, keep the politics out of it,” he continued.
He says "it's obvious that the conflict, started as a limited
territorial war and escalating to a global economic confrontation,
between the whole of the West on the one hand and Russia and China on
the other hand, has become a world war."
He believes that "Putin made a big mistake early on, which is [that] on
the eve of the war [everyone saw Ukraine] not as a fledgling democracy,
but as a society in decay and a “failed state” in the making. [...] I
think the Kremlin's calculation was that this decaying society...
... would crumble at the first shock. But what we have discovered, on
the contrary, is that a society in decomposition, if it is fed by
external financial and military resources, can find in war a new type of
balance, and even a horizon, a hope."
He says he agrees with Mearsheimer's analysis of the conflict:
"Mearsheimer tells us that Ukraine, whose army had been overtaken by
NATO soldiers (American, British and Polish) since at least 2014, was
therefore a de facto member of the NATO, and that the Russians had...
... announced that they would never tolerate Ukraine in NATO. From their
point of view, the Russians are therefore in a war that is defensive
and preventive. Mearsheimer added that we would have no reason to
rejoice in the eventual difficulties of the Russians because...
...since this is an existential question for them, the harder it would
be, the harder they would strike. The analysis seems to hold true."
He however has some criticism for Mearsheimer:
"Mearsheimer, like a good American, overestimates his country. He
considers that, if for the Russians the war in Ukraine is existential,
for the Americans it is basically only one 'game' of power among others.
After Vietnam...
...Iraq and Afghanistan, what's one more debacle? The basic axiom of
American geopolitics is: 'We can do whatever we want because we are
sheltered, far away, between two oceans, nothing will ever happen to
us'. Nothing would be existential for America.
Insufficient analysis which today leads Biden to proceed mindlessly.
America is fragile. The resistance of the Russian economy is pushing the
American imperial system towards the precipice. No one had expected
that the Russian economy would hold up against the 'economic power'...
...of NATO. I believe that the Russians themselves did not anticipate it.
If the Russian economy resisted the sanctions indefinitely and managed
to exhaust the European economy, while it itself remained, backed by
China, American monetary and financial controls of the world......would collapse, and with them the possibility for United States to
fund their huge trade deficit for nothing. This war has therefore become
existential for the United States. No more than Russia, they cannot
withdraw from the conflict, they cannot let go.
This is why we...... are now in an endless war, in a confrontation whose outcome must be the collapse of one or the other."
He firmly believes the US is in decline but sees it as bad news for the autonomy of vassal states:
"I have just read a book by S. Jaishankar, Indian Minister of Foreign
Affairs (The India Way), published just before the war, who sees
American weakness, who knows that the......confrontation between China and the US will have no winner but will
give space to a country like India, and to many others. I add: but not
to Europeans. Everywhere we see the weakening of the US, but not in
Europe and Japan because one of the effects of the retraction of......the imperial system is that the United States strengthens its hold on
its initial protectorates. As the American system shrinks, it weighs
ever more heavily on the local elites of the protectorates (and I
include all of Europe here).
The first to lose all national autonomy...... will be (or already are) the English and the Australians. The
Internet has produced human interaction with the US in the Anglosphere
of such intensity that its academic, media and artistic elites are, so
to speak, annexed. On the European continent we are somewhat...... protected by our national languages, but the fall in our autonomy is
considerable, and rapid. Let's remember the Iraq war, when Chirac,
Schröder and Putin held joint anti-war press conferences."
He underlines the importance of skills and education: "The US is now
twice as populated as Russia (2.2 times in student age groups). But in
the US only 7% are studying engineering, while in Russia it is 25%.
Which means that with 2.2 times fewer people studying, Russia trains......30% more engineers. The US fills the gap with foreign students, but
they're mainly Indians and even more Chinese. This is not safe and is
already decreasing. It is a dilemma of the American economy: it can only
face competition from China by importing skilled Chinese labor."
On the ideological and cultural aspects of the war: "When we see the
Russian Duma pass even more repressive legislation on 'LGBT propaganda',
we feel superior. I can feel that as an ordinary Westerner. But from a
geopolitical point of view, if we think in terms of...... soft power, it is a mistake. On 75% of the planet, the kinship
organization was patrilineal and one can sense a strong understanding of
Russian attitudes. For the collective non-West, Russia affirms a
reassuring moral conservatism."
He continues: "The USSR had a certain form of soft power [but] communism
basically horrified the whole Muslim world by its atheism and inspired
nothing particular in India, outside of West Bengal and Kerala. However,
today, Russia which repositioned itself as the archetype......of the great power, not only anti-colonialist, but also patrilineal
and conservative of traditional mores, can seduce much further. [For
instance] it's obvious that Putin's Russia, having become morally
conservative, has become sympathetic to the Saudis who I'm sure have
a......bit of a hard time with American debates over access for transgender women in the ladies' room.
Western media are tragically funny, they keep saying, 'Russia is
isolated, Russia is isolated'. But when we look at the votes at the UN,
we see that 75% of the world does not......follow the West, which then seems very small.
With an anthropologist reading of this [divide between the West and the
rest] we find that countries in the West often have a nuclear family
structure with bilateral kinship systems, that is to say where male and
female kinship......are equivalent in the definition of the social status of the child.
[Within the rest], with the bulk of the Afro-Euro-Asian mass, we find
community and patrilineal family organizations. We then see that this
conflict, described by our media as a conflict of political......values, is at a deeper level a conflict of anthropological values. It
is this unconscious aspect of the divide and this depth that make the
confrontation dangerous."
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...