strategic-culture |Neoconservatism
started in 1953 with Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the Democratic Party US
Senator from the state of Washington (1953-1983), who became known as a
‘defense’ hawk, and as “the Senator from Boeing,” because Boeing practically owned him. The UK’s Henry Jackson Society was
founded in 2005 in order to carry forward Senator Jackson’s unwavering
and passionate endorsement of growing the American empire so that the US-UK alliance will control the entire world (and US weapons-makers will dominate in every market).
Later,
during the 1990s, neoconservatism became taken over by the Mossad and
the lobbyists for Israel and came to be publicly identified as a
‘Jewish’ ideology, despite its having — and having long had — many
champions who were ‘anti-communist’ or ‘pro-democracy’ or simply even
anti-Russian, but who were neither Jewish nor even focused at all on the
Middle East. Republicans Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and John McCain;
and the Democrat, CIA Director James Woolsey — the latter of whom was one of the patrons of Britain’s Henry Jackson Society —
were especially prominent neoconservatives, who came to prominence even
before neocons became called “neoconservatives.” What all neocons have
always shared in common has been a visceral hatred of Russians. That
comes above anything else — and even above NATO (the main neocon
organization).
During
recent decades, neocons have been hating Iranians and more generally
Shiites — such as in Syria and in Lebanon, and now also in Yemen — and
not only hating Russians.
When
the Israel lobby during the 1990s and after, pumped massive resources
into getting the US Government to invade first Iraq and then Iran,
neoconservatism got its name, but the ideology itself did not change.
However, there are a few neoconservatives today who are too ignorant to
know, in any coherent way, what their own underlying beliefs are, or
why, and so who are anti-Russians (that’s basic for any neocon) who
either don’t know or else don’t particularly care that Iran and Shia
Muslims generally, are allied with Russia. Neoconservatives such as
this, are simply confused neocons, people whose underlying ideology is
self-contradictory, because they’ve not carefully thought things
through.
theamericanconservative | 1) It’s clear now that Europeans will increase their
contributions to NATO. But Big Media totally ignored the trillion dollar
gorilla in room: Why does anyone have to spend so much on NATO in the
first place?
Are we planning a ground attack on Russia because we
really think the former Soviet Empire will invade Poland or the Baltic
nations? Are we planning for a land war in Europe to intervene in the
Ukraine? What for is the money? The Trump administration and Big Media,
for all their noise, mainly argue that more spending is good. There is
no debate about the reasons why. Meanwhile Russia is cutting its military spending.
Washington is so dominated by our
military-industrial-congressional complex that spending money is a major
intent. Remember when Washington first insisted that putting up an
anti-missile system in Poland and Romania was supposed to protect Europe
from an Iranian attack? Of course, it was really directed against
Russia. Washington was so eager to spend the money that it didn’t even
ask the Europeans to pay the cost even though it was supposedly for their defense. As of 2016 Washington had spent $800 million
on the site in Romania. Now it appears that Poland and Romania will pay
billions to the Raytheon Corporation for the shield to comply with
their commitment to increase military spending to 2 percent of gross
national product.
2) There was no focus on the real, growing threat of
nuclear war, intentional or accidental. No one, including journalists at
the joint press conference, spoke about the collapsing missile treaties
(the only one who reportedly seemed keen to discuss it was ejected
beforehand). Scott Ritter details these alarming risks here on TAC.
The U.S. is now funding new cruise missiles with nukes
which allow for a surprise attack on Russia with only a few minutes of
warning, unlike the ICBMs which launch gives a half an hour or more.
This was the reason Russia opposed the anti-missile system in Eastern
Europe, because they could have little warning if cruise missiles were
fired from the new bases. Americans may think that we don’t start wars,
but the Russians don’t. The old shill argument that democracies don’t
start wars is belied by American attacks on Serbia, Iraq, Libya, and
Yemen.
3) For all the Democratic and Big Media attacks on Trump
for supposedly caving in to Putin, he gave Putin nothing. His
administration is still maintaining an increasingly stringent economic
attack on Russian trade and banking, announcing (just days after his
meeting) $200 million of new aid to Ukraine’s military
and threatening Europeans with sanctions if they go ahead with a new
Baltic pipeline to import Russian natural gas. Consequently, some
analysts believe that Putin has given up on wanting better relations
with the U.S. and instead is just trying to weaken and discredit
America’s overwhelming power in the world. In a similar vein Rand Paul
writes how we never think about other nations’ interests.
4) The release of intelligence agency findings about
Russians’ intervention in the last election just a day before the
conference precisely shows the strength of the “Deep State” in
dominating American foreign policy. An article by Bruce Fein in TAC argues we should “Forget Trump: The Military-Industrial Complex is Still Running the Show With Russia,” showing how Washington wants to keep Russia as an enemy because it’s good for business.
Counterpunch | Joe: I think you know that the NATO you are talking about was formed
in 1949, four years after the German defeat (at the hands basically, as
you know, of the Red Army), as a U.S.-led anti-Soviet military alliance.
It was part of the Truman Doctrine, which legitimated all efforts to
contain the communist “enemy” whether by military force (the suppression
of the Greek communist partisans who had heroically resisted the
fascists), by rigged elections (in France and Italy in 1946-48), by
espionage, political assassinations, disinformation campaigns and
military alliances.
I assume you know this history anyway. It might have been taught at
Pensacola Catholic High School in the late seventies, or at the
University of Alabama in the early 1980s, or you might have learned it
during your law school years in Florida or during your brief tenure in
Congress.
Anyway (as you know), when NATO expanded in 1956 to include the
U.S.-occupied West Germany, Moscow responded—you might say, somewhat
belatedly—by creating the Warsaw Pact. There were then 15 members of
NATO (Spain joined in 1982). But the Warsaw Pact included only 8 nations
at its height. Its forces were deployed precisely once during its
existence, in Czechoslovakia in 1968 to suppress the Prague Spring
movement. Albania had already been expelled from the pact, and Romania
in this instance refused to participate. (Indeed Bucharest denounced the
Soviet-led intervention in Czechoslovakia and sought closer relations
with both the U.S. and China in its aftermath.)
The Soviets were less interested in “dividing” NATO than in
preserving control over their own cordon sanitaire in “eastern”
Europe—their control over the sphere they had conquered while destroying
the Wehrmacht in 1944-45. (Moscow was no doubt pleased when Charles De
Gaulle pulled France out of NATO’s military structure in 1966, but that
was clearly the French president’s decision based on French
nationalism.) The Soviets of course hoped for allies win in contested
elections and to be appointed to high office in western Europe (although
as you know, Joe, Truman forbade allies from allowing communists into
their cabinets). Of course the Soviets were interested in dividing
NATO—not to invade the NATO countries, but rather to defend themselves.
This remains Russia’s objective.
As the Berlin Wall fell in 1988 Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev
agreed to the expansion of NATO to include East Germany, as it was
reunited with the West; in return he demanded a commitment from George
H. W. Bush that the alliance would not advance “one inch” towards the
east. You know very well that James Baker averred this publicly in
Moscow.
And as you know, Joe, the U.S. has broken this promise since 1999
when Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary (the core of the Warsaw Pact
dissolved in 1991 along with the Soviet Union) joined NATO. And then in
2004 George W. Bush (who had looked into Putin’s eyes and seen his soul,
and welcomed his help after 9/11) further broke it when he expanded the
alliance to include Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania,
Slovakia and Slovenia. And then in 2009 with Albania and Croatia, and
Montenegro last year (so Trump could join in on the process). Look at a
map and see how NATO’s expanded and ask what would you think if you were
watching from Moscow.
The anti-Russian NATO military alliance numbering 16 nations in 1991
now numbers 28, including four that border Russia. It is not your
daddy’s NATO. It’s foolish of you talk about Moscow now using “Soviet
strategy.” What do you mean by that? Do you know yourself? Make a
specific comparison; I challenge you.
Joe, if you do not see why the Russian state (and people) would view
this expanding alliance with anxiety you really are ignorant of history.
The Russians are at once aware that they, not the NATO countries, have
more often been the victims of aggression in the past, and they have no
intentions of invading Europe. The Warsaw Pact has been gone 26 years.
And Russians know better perhaps than people in this country how NATO
has been used since the USSR collapsed. And how U.S. governments and
mass media whip up fears among the people of this country that often
become pretexts for aggression.
How has NATO ever been deployed? Never during the Cold War; it was
not necessary. It was first used in Bosnia in 1994-5, then in Serbia
1999, then Afghanistan, 2001-present, then Libya in that disgraceful war
crime in 2011. As for Russia wanting to divide NATO—well of course! RT
reports positively on the rise of Eurosceptics and nationalists in NATO
member states; the fact is, there is a lot of anti-NATO sentiment in
Europe, especially in some eastern European countries. The anti-Russian
sanctions the EU has adopted under U.S. pressure (exercised largely
through the Brexiting UK) following the Kiev events and Russia’s
re-annexation of Crimea, are not popular among European farmers and
manufacturers. There are internal tensions in NATO that may weaken it.
The Russians can try to exploit and exacerbate the contradictions but
they can’t create them.
PCR | The article is long but very important and is worth a careful read.
It shows that the military/security complex has woven itself so tightly
into the American social, economic, and political fabric as to be
untouchable. President Trump is an extremely brave or foolhardy person
to take on this most powerful and pervasive of all US institutions by
trying to normalize US relations with Russia, chosen by the
military/security complex as the “enemy” that justifies its enormous
budget and power.
In 1961 President Eisenhower in his last public address to the
American people warned us about the danger to democracy and accountable
government presented by the military/industrial complex. You can
imagine how much stronger the complex is 57 years later after decades of
Cold War with the Soviet Union.
The Russian government, Russian media, and Russian people desperately
need to comprehend how powerful the US military/security complex is and
how it is woven into the fabric of America. No amount of diplomacy by
Lavrov and masterful chess playing by Putin can possibly shake the
control over the United States exercised by the military/security
complex.
Professor Roelofs has done a good deed for the American people and
for the world in assembling such extensive information documenting the
penetration into every aspect of American life of the military/security
complex. It is a delusion that a mere President of the United States
can bring such a powerfull, all-pervasive institution to heel and
deprive it of its necessary enemy.
joanroelofs | Among the businesses with large DoD contracts are book publishers:
McGraw-Hill, Greenwood, Scholastic, Pearson, Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt,
Elsevier, and others. Rarely have the biases in this industry, in
fiction, nonfiction, and textbook offerings, been examined. Yet the
influences on this small but significant population, the reading public,
and the larger schooled contingent, may help explain the silence of the
literate crowd and college graduates.
Much of what is left of organized industrial labor is in weapons
manufacture. Its PACs fund the few “progressive” candidates in our
political system, who tend to be silent about war and the threat of
nuclear annihilation. Unlike other factories, the armaments makers do
not suddenly move overseas, although they do use subcontractors
worldwide.
Military spending may be only about 6% of the GDP, yet it has great
impact because: 1. it is a growing sector; 2. it is recession-proof; 3.
it does not rely on consumer whims; 4. it is the only thing prospering
in many areas; and 5. the “multiplier” effect: subcontracting, corporate
purchasing, and employee spending perk up the regional economy. It is
ideally suited to Keynesian remedies, because of its ready destruction
and obsolescence: what isn’t consumed in warfare, rusted out, or donated
to our friends still needs to be replaced by the slightly more lethal
thing. Many of our science graduates work for the military directly or
its contractee labs concocting these.
The military’s unbeatable weapon is jobs, and all members of
Congress, and state and local officials, are aware of this. It is where
well-paying jobs are found for mechanics, scientists, and engineers;
even janitorial workers do well in these taxpayer-rich firms. Weaponry
is also important in our manufactured goods exports as our allies are
required to have equipment that meets our specifications. Governments,
rebels, terrorists, pirates, and gangsters all fancy our high tech and
low tech lethal devices.
Our military economy also yields a high return on investments. These
benefit not only corporate executives and other rich, but many middle
and working class folk, as well as churches, benevolent, and cultural
organizations. The lucrative mutual funds offered by Vanguard, Fidelity,
and others are heavily invested in the weapons manufacturers.
Individual investors may not know what is in their fund’s portfolios;
the institutions usually know. A current project of World Beyond War
(https://worldbeyondwar.org/divest) advocates divestment of military
stocks in the pension funds of state and local government workers:
police, firepersons, teachers, and other civil servants. Researchers are
making a state-by-state analysis of these funds. Among the findings are
the extensive military stock holdings of CALpers, the California Public
Employees Retirement System (the sixth largest pension fund on earth),
the California State Teachers Retirement System, the New York State
Teachers Retirement System, the New York City Employees Retirement
System, and the New York State Common Retirement Fund (state and local
employees). Amazing! the New York City teachers were once the proud
parents of red diaper babies.
The governmental side of the MIC complex goes far beyond the DoD. In
the executive branch, Departments of State, Homeland Security, Energy,
Veterans Affairs, Interior; and CIA, AID, FBI, NASA, and other agencies;
are permeated with military projects and goals. Even the Department of
Agriculture has a joint program with the DoD to “restore” Afghanistan by
creating a dairy cattle industry. No matter that the cattle and their
feed must be imported, cattle cannot graze in the terrain as the native
sheep and goats can, there is no adequate transportation or
refrigeration, and the Afghans don’t normally drink milk. The native
animals provide yogurt, butter, and wool, and graze on the rugged
slopes, but that is all so un-American.
Quantamagazine | Furey has gone further. In her most recent published paper, which appeared in May in TheEuropean Physical Journal C,
she consolidated several findings to construct the full Standard Model
symmetry group, SU(3) × SU(2) × U(1), for a single generation of
particles, with the math producing the correct array of electric charges
and other attributes for an electron, neutrino, three up quarks, three
down quarks and their anti-particles. The math also suggests a reason why electric charge is quantized in discrete units — essentially, because whole numbers are.
However, in that model’s way of arranging particles, it’s unclear how
to naturally extend the model to cover the full three particle
generations that exist in nature. But in another new paper that’s now
circulating among experts and under review by Physical Letters B, Furey uses C⊗O
to construct the Standard Model’s two unbroken symmetries, SU(3) and
U(1). (In nature, SU(2) × U(1) is broken down into U(1) by the Higgs
mechanism, a process that imbues particles with mass.) In this case, the
symmetries act on all three particle generations and also allow for the
existence of particles called sterile neutrinos — candidates for dark
matter that physicists are actively searching for now. “The
three-generation model only has SU(3) × U(1), so it’s more rudimentary,”
Furey told me, pen poised at a whiteboard. “The question is, is there
an obvious way to go from the one-generation picture to the
three-generation picture? I think there is.”
This is the main question she’s after now. The mathematical physicists Michel Dubois-Violette, Ivan Todorov and Svetla Drenska are also trying to model
the three particle generations using a structure that incorporates
octonions called the exceptional Jordan algebra. After years of working
solo, Furey is beginning to collaborate with researchers who take
different approaches, but she prefers to stick with the product of the
four division algebras, R⊗C⊗H⊗O,
acting on itself. It’s complicated enough and provides flexibility in
the many ways it can be chopped up. Furey’s goal is to find the model
that, in hindsight, feels inevitable and that includes mass, the Higgs
mechanism, gravity and space-time.
Already, there’s a sense of space-time in the math. She finds that all multiplicative chains of elements of R⊗C⊗H⊗O
can be generated by 10 matrices called “generators.” Nine of the
generators act like spatial dimensions, and the 10th, which has the
opposite sign, behaves like time. String theory also predicts 10
space-time dimensions — and the octonions are involved there as well.
Whether or how Furey’s work connects to string theory remains to be
puzzled out.
So does her future. She’s looking for a faculty job now, but failing
that, there’s always the ski slopes or the accordion. “Accordions are
the octonions of the music world,” she said — “tragically
misunderstood.” She added, “Even if I pursued that, I would always be
working on this project.”
Genomeweb | Human Longevity (HLI) is suing the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI)
and a number of unknown defendants over the misappropriation and use of
trade secrets passed along by Craig Venter, the founder of both the
company and the institute that bears his name.
In a complaint
filed last Friday with the US District Court for the Southern District
of California, Human Longevity alleges that upon his termination from
HLI on May 24, Venter took a company-owned laptop with trade secrets and
passed on protected information to the Venter Institute, of which he is
chairman and CEO. HLI also claims that the institute is working on a
product that will compete with its own business.
According to the complaint, Venter was CEO of Human Longevity from
2014 until January 2017, when he became the firm's executive chairman
and signed a "proprietary information and inventions" agreement. He
assumed the role of interim CEO in November of 2017 until his employment
was terminated in May of this year. During his time at HLI, Venter used
a company-owned laptop computer, the contents of which were backed up
in the cloud, and consistently used his JCVI email address rather than
his HLI email to conduct company business, the complaint states.
In
the spring of this year, Venter "withheld critical information from the
board and the HLI investors regarding the conduct of an HLI key
executive which would likely result in termination," the complaint says.
Further, in May, Venter had an HLI-paid counsel "draft a
Venter-favorable employment contract" and appointed a new interim
president without conferring with the HLI board first.
On May 24,
the HLI board "considered a rushed investor deal which Venter presented
to them only less than two weeks earlier," the terms of which the board
considered one-sided. The deal would have provided financial incentives
to Venter and offered the new investor rights that had already been
granted to another party, according to the complaint. "At that point,
the HLI board voted to terminate Venter from HLI," it states.
Following
his termination, Venter left the HLI offices with the company-owned
laptop and "immediately began using the HLI computer and server to
communicate to the public, solicit HLI investors and employees," the
complaint says. In a Twitter message on May 24, Venter said that he was retiring from HLI and returning to JCVI.
His
access to the HLI server and HLI emails was disabled the next day, but
the company alleges that "even after his HLI termination, Venter used
the HLI computer, accessed and sent HLI proprietary information and
trade secrets," including communications involving Series C and Asia JV
Series A documents.
UAB | Wrinkled skin and hair loss are hallmarks of aging. What if they could be reversed?
Keshav Singh, Ph.D., and colleagues have done just that, in a mouse model developed at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
When a mutation leading to mitochondrial dysfunction is induced, the
mouse develops wrinkled skin and extensive, visible hair loss in a
matter of weeks. When the mitochondrial function is restored by turning
off the gene responsible for mitochondrial dysfunction, the mouse
returns to smooth skin and thick fur, indistinguishable from a healthy
mouse of the same age.
“To our knowledge, this observation is unprecedented,” said Singh, a professor of genetics in the UAB School of Medicine.
Importantly, the mutation that does this is in a nuclear gene
affecting mitochondrial function, the tiny organelles known as the
powerhouses of the cells. Numerous mitochondria in cells produce 90
percent of the chemical energy cells need to survive.
In humans, a decline in mitochondrial function is seen during aging,
and mitochondrial dysfunction can drive age-related diseases. A
depletion of the DNA in mitochondria is also implicated in human
mitochondrial diseases, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, age-associated
neurological disorders and cancer.
“This mouse model,” Singh said, “should provide an unprecedented
opportunity for the development of preventive and therapeutic drug
development strategies to augment the mitochondrial functions for the
treatment of aging-associated skin and hair pathology and other human
diseases in which mitochondrial dysfunction plays a significant role.”
theburningplatform | Putin moved against the so-called “oligarch’s, a mainly Jewish gang
of ex-Communists who were in the forefront of looting the country.
Those he did not chase off to London (where you can see their greasy
mugs swilling in the best restaurants, hookers on each arm) he placed
under firm control. He reorganized the economy for Russia’s benefit,
not ours. Meddling? The United States and various European countries
sent in armies of international do-gooders and busy bodies to undermine
the Russian government and, among other things, promote the homosexual
agenda and corrupt Russian youth. Loudmouth journalists, the Russian
equivalents of Bill Maher, Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper, Trevor Noah
and similar troublemakers (“pro-democracy” activists, all of them) were
put on a leash. Most surprisingly for me, and effectively for Putin, he
restored the Russian Orthodox Church to its former importance and
influence, a very Russian thing to do. Is Putin a real Christian? I
don’t know. Go ask him. If it is merely a cynical ploy it has worked.
I might add that I admire the Russian Orthodox Church. It is one of
the few Christian churches that has rejected the filth and garbage of
the modern world and remains focused on its real job, saving souls.
There are no faggot priests in it, I can tell you that. Orthodox
priests marry.
Putin shrewdly decided to focus on quality rather than quantity in
his rebuilding of the Russian military. If news reports are accurate
(and I sure as hell hope they are not) the Russians have developed new
generations of weapons against which we have no real defense. China has
done exactly the same thing.
There is no reason at all to believe that Russia has any intention of
actually using those weapons against us in some new Pearl Harbor. That
being the case, Putin has made it crystal clear that he will not allow
Russia to be pushed around. Where is his redline? Who knows? I don’t
want to find out.
The sight of a rejuvenated Russia, proud, controlling its own
economy, conducting its won foreign policy in what it believes to be its
own interests, throwing pedophiles and other perverts in jail, running
foreign subversives out of the place, arresting or exiling Jewish
gangsters, well, all of this is just too much for the globalists and the
Neo-Con’s to take.
Then comes Trump! Who woulda thunk it? I seriously doubt if a
single senior Russian ever imagined that Trump would emerge as a
presidential candidate. Did you?
This man, seen by the self-proclaimed elites of the U.S. and Europe
as a turd in their punchbowl, is by any measure the most extraordinary
person ever to occupy the White House.
Trump is not a Russian agent, he has not been blackmailed, he is not
selling out the U.S., his interest in improving ties with Russia has
nothing to do with his personal business empire, he did not have two
Russian whores do pee-pee on Obama’s mattress. Any person who claims
to believe any of these things should be immediately marked down as
either a fool, a Jew with an irrational ancestral hatred of Russia, a
globalist, a Neo-Con, a leftist angry that Putin and Trump are both
standing up for traditional culture (though neither are saints
themselves), or somebody who either lost out on the Great Russia Piñata
of the early 1990’s or fears that Russia will in some way hit them in
the pocketbook, directly or indirectly.
There are several interest groups desperate to stop the building of a
rational, normal, civilized relationship between the United States and
Russia. They include:
unz |Putin’s
problem is the hybrid warfare carried out by the United States against
Russia. Despite accusations you hear in your media (alleged Russian ads
in the Facebook and Twitter influencing voters), American pressure on
Russia is very real and very painful. American officials try to wreck
every international deal Russia attempts to clinch. It is not only, or
even mainly about weapons. If a country A wants to sell Russians, say,
bananas, the US ambassador will come to A’s king, or his minister, and
will expressly forbid him to sell bananas to godless Russians.
Otherwise, do not expect the US aid, or do not count on US favours in
your disputes with your neighbours, or the US won’t buy your production,
or US banks will take another long and jaundiced view at your financial
transactions. You witnessed the scene,
when the crazed Nikki Haley, the US Ambassador to the UN, threatened
sovereign nations with severe punishment for voting against the US
desires, so you have an idea of American delicacy and caution while
pushing their will through.
Perhaps our colleague Mr Andrei Martyanov is right and the US can’t destroy Russia militarily; perhaps Immanuel Wallerstein
is correct and American power is in decline; but meanwhile the US is
perfectly able to make life hard and difficult for any state. It made
life unbearably hard for North Korea, extremely hard for Iran. Russia is
not doing half as good as she could do without ceaseless American
meddling.
President
Putin would like Trump to relent. There is no reason for this incessant
picking on Russia; it is not Communist anymore; it is much smaller and
less populous than the former USSR; it wants to live in peace as a
member of the family of nations, not as a great alternative. The
anti-Russian offensive began in earnest in the days of previous US
presidents, namely Obama and Clinton; so it would make sense for Trump
to stop it.
Problem
is, President Trump is also actively engaged in war against Russia.
Just a few days ago he pressured the German Chancellor to give up on the
North Stream-2, to stop buying Russian gas. His advisers demanded that
Turkey desist from buying a Russian antimissile system. The US Air Force
bombed Russian troops in Syria.
Still
Putin made a good try. He proposed to hold a referendum in the Donbas
area of Eastern Ukraine which is presently independent though lacking
international recognition. The people of Donbas had their own referendum
in 2014, and voted for independence; Kiev regime and its Western
sponsors denied its validity as it was done under Russian army’s
protection, they claimed. Now Putin proposed a re-run under
international auspices.
medium | We were
scheduled to have sixty minutes with Putin. After pleasantries were
exchanged, Obama opened the conversation by expressing his optimism for
U.S.-Russia relations. Putin interrupted him early to express a
different view.
For
the next hour, Putin walked through the complete history of
U.S.-Russian relations during his time as president. He punctuated his
narrative with several instances of disrespect from the Bush
administration. He liked President George W. Bush as a person, he told
Obama, but loathed his administration. As Putin explained, he had
reached out to Bush after September 11, believing that the United States
and Russia should unite to fight terrorists as a common enemy. He had
helped persuade leaders in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to allow the U.S.
to open air bases in their countries to help fight the war in
Afghanistan. But in return, so he claimed, the Bush administration had
snubbed him.
Putin even suggested that Russia and the United States
could have cooperated on Iraq had the Bush administration treated Russia
as an equal partner. But it did not, and that’s why U.S.-Russia
relations deteriorated so dramatically while Bush was president. The
Bush team had supported color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine — a
blatant threat to Russia’s national interests. In Putin’s view, Russia
had done nothing wrong; America was to be blamed for the poor relations
between the two countries.
Putin
knew how to tell a dramatic story. For each vignette of disrespect or
confrontation, he told the president the date, the place, and who was at
the meeting. During one story, he pointed to a chair he recalled
Condoleezza Rice sitting in at the time, right next to Sergei Ivanov,
then Putin’s defense minister. He must have rehearsed all these details
beforehand. For one story about counterterrorism cooperation, Putin told
Obama how the Russians had benefited from some information shared with
them by American officials. Dramatically, he waved away the waiters
serving us tea, leaned in, and told Obama that they had used this
information to “liquidate” the terrorists.
As
I remember it, Putin spoke uninterrupted for nearly the entire time
scheduled for the meeting, documenting the injustices of the Bush
administration. This was a guy with a chip on his shoulder. Obama
listened patiently, maybe too patiently. I was amazed. There was no way I
could have sat for a full hour without saying something. I was also
nervous. The meeting was scheduled for sixty minutes, and by minute
fifty-five the U.S. president had not said a thing. It was my assignment
to read out this meeting to our press corps later that day. I couldn’t
tell them that Obama had merely listened the entire time!
My worries
were misplaced. In the end the meeting went well beyond three hours, and
Obama had plenty to say. His main message was again about Reset. He
asked Putin to have an open mind about resuming engagement with the
United States on issues of common interest. He explained to Putin that
he was different, representing a break with many of the policies of the
Bush administration. Obama avoided flowery language about friendships
and strategic partnerships. Instead, he pledged to always be straight
with Putin and to respect Russia.
The
two most contentious subjects that morning were missile defense and
Iran. Putin explained to Obama why planned American missile deployments
in Europe threatened “strategic stability” — otherwise known as mutual
assured destruction (MAD) — between our two countries. Putin seemed
annoyed — irrationally annoyed — with the Bush administration’s plan for
missile-defense deployments so close to Russia’s borders. Obama pledged
to review America’s missile-defense plans and get back to Putin on his
decisions. Putin expressed less concern about the Iranian threat than
Medvedev had. He talked more generally about the strategic importance of
Russia’s bilateral relationship with Iran as its most significant
partner in the Middle East.
unz |But there is more bad news for the AngloZionist Empire: in a recent interview by General Iurii Borisov,
Deputy Prime Minister for Defense and Space Industry named six weapons
systems which, in his opinion, have no counterpart in western arsenals.
These include two almost never (or very rarely) mentioned before:
The “Sarmat” heavy MIRVed ICBM
The Sukhoi Su-57 aka “PAKFA”, the 5th generation jet fighter being developed for air superiority and attack operations
The revolutionary T-14 “Armata” main battle tank
The long-range S-500 air defense system
The mobile anti-satellite system “Nudol“
The ground-based mobile jamming system for satellite communications “Triada-2S“
While
the first four systems listed have been known for a while, very little
is known about the Nudol ASAT or the Triada-2S jamming systems. A couple
of years ago, in 2015, The Washington Free Beacon wrote one article
about the Nudol system entitled “Russia Flight Tests Anti-Satellite Missile Moscow joins China in space warfare buildup”
but I did not find anything at all in English about the Triada-2S.
There are a few articles published about these two systems in Russian
however, and I will summarize them here beginning with the Nudol system.
The
Russian plan to counter the US military threat is becoming clearer and
clearer with each passing day. I would summarize as follows:
US Capability
Russian Response
ABM system
maneuverable hypersonic ballistic and very long-range cruise missiles
US aircraft carriers and surface fleet
maneuverable hypersonic ballistic and very long-range cruise missiles
US airpower and cruise missiles
advanced and integrated air defenses + 5th generation multirole fighters
US attack submarines
advanced diesel-electric/AIP submarines in littoral and coastal waters
US command, control, communications, networks, and satellites
electronic warfare and anti-satellite systems
US/NATO deployments near Russia
Tank Armies with T-14s, doubling of the size of the Airborne Forces, Iskander missiles (see here)
US nuclear forces
Deployment of a next-generation SSBNs, road-mobile and rail-mobile ICBMs, PAK-DA (next generation bomber) and ABM systems
By
targeting US space-based capabilities Russia is aiming at an exceedingly
important and currently extremely fragile segment of the US armed
forces and the impact of that cannot be overstated. It is already well
known that the US military has almost no practice operating in a highly
contested electronic warfare environment and that, in fact, US EW
capabilities have stagnated over the years. In the age of advanced
communication and network-centric warfare, the disruption or elimination
of any meaningful segment of the US space-based capabilities would have
a dramatic impact on US warfighting capabilities. Just like US tactical
air is practically completely dependent on AWACs support, all the
branches of the US military have grown accustomed to enjoying advanced
command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance,
and reconnaissance capabilities (C4ISR) and this is what the Russians
want to deny them (and you can bet that the Chinese are working along
the exact same lines).
This is not to say that Russia has achieved anywhere near full-spectrum dominance
over the United States but it does mean that the United States has
totally failed in its efforts to achieve anything near full-spectrum
dominance over Russia and, therefore, over the rest of the planet. It is
important to understand that while, for the US, it is crucial to
achieving superiority, for Russia it is enough to deny that superiority
to the US. Russia, therefore, has no need to achieve anything even
remotely resembling full-spectrum dominance over the US/NATO – all she
needs to achieve is to make it impossible for the Empire to make her
submit by force or threat of force.
unz |Enter Mr Andrey Nekrasov,
a Russian dissident filmmaker. He made a few films considered to be
highly critical of Russian government. He alleged the FSB blew up houses
in Moscow in order to justify the Chechnya war. He condemned the
Russian war against Georgia in 2008, and had been given a medal by
Georgian authorities. He did not doubt the official Western version of
Browder-Magnitsky affair, and decided to make a film about the noble
American businessman and the brave Russian lawyer fighting for human
rights. The European organisations and parliamentarians provided the
budget for the film. They also expected the film to denounce Putin and
glorify Magnitsky, the martyr.
However,
while making the film, Mr Nekrasov had his Road to Damascus moment. He
realised that the whole narrative was hinging on the unsubstantiated
words of Mr Browder. After painstaking research, he came to some totally
different conclusions, and in his version, Browder was a cheat who run
afoul of law, while Magnitsky was his sidekick in those crimes.
Nekrasov
discovered an interview Magnitsky gave in his jail. In this interview,
the accountant said he was afraid Browder would kill him to prevent him
from denouncing Browder, and would make him his scapegoat. It turned out
Browder tried to bribe the journalist who made the interview to have
these words expunged. Browder was the main beneficiary of the
accountant’s death, realised Nekrasov, while his investigators were
satisfied with Magnitsky’s collaboration with them.
Nekrasov
could not find any evidence that Magnitsky tried to investigate the
misdeeds of government officials. He was too busy covering his own tax
evasion. And instead of fitting his preconceived notions, Nekrasov made
the film about what he learned. (Here are some details of Nekrasov’s film)
While
the screening in the EU Parliament was been stopped by the powerful Mr
Browder, in Washington DC the men are made of sterner stuff. Despite
Browder’s threats the film was screened,
presented by the best contemporary American investigative journalist
Seymour Hersh, who is 80 if a day, and still going strong. One has to
recognise that the US is second to none for freedom of speech on the
globe.
What
makes Browder so powerful? He invests in politicians. This is probably a
uniquely Jewish quality: Jews outspend everybody in contributions to
political figures. The Arabs will spend more on horses and jets, the
Russians prefer real estate, the Jews like politicians. The Russian NTV
channel reported that Browder lavishly financed the US lawmakers. Here
they present alleged evidence of money transfers: some hundred thousand
dollars was given by Browder’s structures officially to the senators
and congressmen in order to promote the Magnitsky Act.
Much
bigger sums were transferred via good services of Brothers Ziff,
mega-rich Jewish American businessmen, said the researchers in two
articles published on the Veteran News Network and in The Huffington Post.
These
two articles were taken off the sites very fast under pressure of
Browder’s lawyers, but they are available in the cache. They disclose
the chief beneficiary of Browder’s generosity. This is Senator Ben
Cardin, a Democrat from Maryland. He was the engine behind Magnitsky Act
legislation to such an extent that the Act has been often called the Cardin List.
Cardin is a fervent supporter of Hillary Clinton, also a cold warrior
of good standing. More to a point, Cardin is a prominent member of
Israel Lobby.
Browder affair is a heady upper-class Jewish cocktail of money, spies, politicians and international crime.
Almost all involved figures appear to be Jewish, not only Browder,
Brothers Ziff and Ben Cardin. Even his enemy, the beneficiary of the
scam that (according to Browder) took over his Russian assets is another
Jewish businessman Dennis Katsiv (he had been partly exonerated by a New York court as is well described in this thoughtful piece).
Browder
began his way to riches under the patronage of a very rich and very
crooked Robert Maxwell, a Czech-born Jewish businessman who assumed a
Scots name. Maxwell stole a few million dollars from his company pension
fund before dying in mysterious circumstances on board of his yacht in
the Atlantic. It was claimed by a member of Israeli Military
Intelligence, Ari Ben Menashe, that Maxwell had been a Mossad agent for
years, and he also said Maxwell tipped the Israelis about Israeli
whistle-blower Mordecai Vanunu. Vanunu was kidnapped and spent many
years in Israeli jails.
theduran | The result was an agreement between Putin and Trump to reopen
channels of communication between their governments and to meet
regularly with each other as they feel their way towards a
rapprochement.
To be clear, that rapprochement will not mean and is not intended to
mean that the US and Russia will cease to be adversaries and will become
friends.
Instead what is being discussed are steps to bring to a stop the
downward spiral in their relations, with each side obtaining a better
understanding of the other side’s moves and red lines, so that hopefully
geopolitical disasters like the 2014 Maidan coup can be avoided in
future.
That would be a major advance over what has existed previously given
that since the USSR collapsed in 1991 the US has refused to acknowledge
that Russia has any right to any opinions at all, let alone to act
independently or set out red lines.
Needless to say the more often Putin and Trump meet the more
‘normalised’ relations between the US and Russia become, with each
meeting provoking less controversy than the previous one, with the whole
process beyond a certain point becoming routine so that it attracts
ever less attention and (hopefully) eventually becomes uncontroversial.
It is because the powerful forces in the US who scorn the idea of a
‘geopolitical ceasefire’ and want ever greater confrontation between the
US and Russia do not want to see relations ‘normalised’ in this way
that their reaction to the summit has been so hysterical.
As of the time of writing it is these people who in the media and on
twitter are making the running. However it may be a mistake to see in
the volume of the noise they are making a true reflection of their
influence.
Last February’s Nuclear Posture Review
suggests that there is a very powerful constituency within the US and
specifically within the Pentagon which might potentially support the
sort of ‘geopolitical ceasefire’ with Russia that Donald Trump appears
to be gradually working towards.
The Nuclear Posture Review shows that some sections of the US
military understand how dangerously overstretched the US has become as
it responds simultaneously to challenges from Russia in Europe and from
China in the Pacific. Both Putin and Trump mentioned during their news
conference the extent to which their respective militaries are already
in contact with each other and are working well together
Donald Trump: Well, our militaries do get along.
In fact, our militaries actually have gotten along probably better than
our political leaders for years, but our militaries do get along very
well and they do coordinate in Syria and other places. Ok? Thank you. Vladimir Putin:……..On the whole, I really agree with
the President. Our military cooperation is going quite well. I hope
that they will continue to be able to come to agreements just as they
have been…..
That may be a sign that there is more understanding of what Donald
Trump is trying to do – at least within the US defence establishment –
than the hysteria the Helsinki summit has provoked might suggest.
Overall, provided it is clearly understood that what Putin and Trump
are working towards is a detente style ‘geopolitical ceasefire’ and not
‘friendship’ – and certainly not an alliance – it can be said that
their summit in Helsinki was a good start and a success.
What happens next depends on whether the forces of realism and sanity
in the US can prevail over those of megalomania and hysteria. Given
how entrenched the latter have become unfortunately no one can count on
this.
However some sort of process which may in time lead to detente and an
easing of tensions between the nuclear superpowers has begun. Given
the circumstances in which it has been launched that is more than might
have been expected even a short time ago, and for that one should be
grateful.
atimes | It’s crystal clear that President Trump is applying Kissingerian
divide-and-rule tactics, trying to reduce Russian political/economic
connectivity with the two other Eurasian integration poles, China and
Iran.
Still, the swamp cannot possibly contemplate The Big Picture – as this must-watch conversation
between two of the very few Americans who actually know Russia in-depth
attests. Professor Stephen Cohen and Professor John Mearsheimer go to
the jugular: Nothing can be done when Russophobia is the law of the
land.
Over and over again, we must go back to Putin’s March 1 speech, which
presented the US with what can only be described, writes Martyanov, as
“a military-technological Pearl Harbor-meets-Stalingrad.”
Martyanov goes all the way to explain how the latest Russian weapons systems
present immense strategic – and historical – ramifications. The missile
gap between the US and Russia is now “a technological abyss,” with
ballistic missiles “capable of trajectories which render any kind of
anti-ballistic defense useless.” Star Wars and its derivatives are now – to use a Trumpism – “obsolete.”
The Kinzhal, as described by Martyanov, is “a complete game-changer
geopolitically, strategically, operationally, tactically and
psychologically.” In a nutshell, “no modern or prospective air-defense
system deployed today by NATO can intercept even a single missile with
such characteristics.”
This means, among other things – and stressing it is never enough –
that the whole Eastern Mediterranean can be closed off, not to mention
the whole Persian Gulf. And all this goes way beyond asymmetry; it’s
about “the final arrival of a completely new paradigm” in warfare and
military technology.
Martyanov’s must-read book is the ultimate Weapon of Myth Destruction
(WMD). And unlike the Saddam Hussein version, this one actually exists.
As Putin warned (at 7:10 in the video), “They did not listen to us then.” Are they listening now?
straightlinelogic | Vladimir Putin is a black belt in judo, the only Russian and one of
the few people in the world to be awarded the rank of eighth dan. He
also practices karate.
A fundamental principle of martial arts is using an opponent’s size
and momentum against him. This is Putin’s strategic approach. Westerners
demonize Putin, but few try to understand him. Trying to understand
someone else is regarded as a pointless in narcissistic America,
selfie-land. Perhaps 90 percent of the populace is incapable of grasping
anything more subtle than a political cartoon.
That’s a pity, because Putin has accomplished a geopolitical triumph
worthy of study. He’s catalyzing the downfall of the American empire,
and it has nothing to do with subverting elections or suborning Trump.
Putin became acting prime minister in 1999, then president in 2000.
The Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse devastated Russia. The economy shrunk
and life expectancies fell. A group of rapacious oligarchs, many with
Western backing, acquired Soviet industrial and commercial assets at
fire sale prices.
Putin coopted the most important oligarchs, letting them hold on to
their loot and power in exchange for their allegiance. This bargain has
been a bulwark of both his continuing political support and his
reportedly immense personal fortune. He quelled a long-running
insurrection in Chechnya and stabilized the situation there, exchanging a
measure of autonomy for a declaration in the Chechen constitution that
it was part of Russia. During his first two terms, from 2000-2008, the
economy began recovering from the 1990s. Projecting a law and order
image while stifling critics, he solidified what has become his
unwavering support, winning 72 percent of the vote in the 2004
presidential election.
A coterie of highly placed idiots in the US and Europe insist that
Putin’s ultimate goal is to reconstitute the former Soviet Union on his
way to global domination. Russia’s GDP, after 18 years of recovery, is
$1.4 trillion, compared to almost $20 trillion for the US and over $17
trillion for the European Union. Russia’s military budget is $61
billion, versus $250 billion for NATO nations (excluding the US) and
over $700 billion for the US. The scaremongering screeds never say where
Russia will get the money to invade and conquer former Soviet
provinces, much less conquer the world. Putin, unlike America’s high and
mighty, realizes from Soviet experience that empires drain rather than
augment an empire’s resources.
Conquering the world is one thing, throwing the American empire to
the mat another. Putin must have smiled when George W. Bush invaded
Afghanistan in pursuit of Osama bin Laden, purported mastermind of the
9/11 attacks. The US’s hubristic rage led it into what has been a
quagmire at best, a graveyard at worst, for a string of invaders,
including the Soviet Union.
kunstler | “For more than a
decade, Russia has meddled in elections around the world, supported
brutal dictators and invaded sovereign nations — all to the detriment of
United States interests.”
— The New York Times
The Resistance sure got a case of the vapors this week over Mr.
Trump’s failure to throttle America’s arch-enemy, the murderous thug V.
Putin of Russia, onstage in Helsinki, as any genuine Marvel Comix hero
is expected to do when facing consummate evil. Instead, the Golden Golem
of Greatness voiced some doubts about the veracity of our “intelligence
community” — as the shape-shifting Moloch of black ops likes to call
itself, as if it were a kindly service organization in Mr. Rogers
neighborhood, collecting dimes for victims of childhood cancer.
If I may be frank, the US Intel community looks like a much bigger
threat to American life and values than anything Mr. Putin is doing, for
instance his alleged “meddling” in US elections. This word, meddling,
absolutely pervades the captive Resistance news outlets these days. It
has a thrilling vagueness about it, intimating all kinds of dark deeds
without specifying anything, as consorting with Satan once did in our history. The reason: the only specific acts associated with this meddling
include the disclosure of incriminating emails among the Democratic
National Committee leadership, and a tiny gang of Facebook trolls making
sport of profoundly idiotic and dysfunctional American electoral
politics.
The brief against Russia also contains vague accusations of
“aggression.” It is hard to discern what is meant by that — though it
apparently warms the heart of American war hawks and their paymasters in
the warfare industries. They allege that Russia “stole” Crimea from
Ukraine. Consider: Crimea had been a province of Russia since the 1700s.
Ukraine itself was a province of the USSR when Nikita Khrushchev put
Crimea under Ukraine’s administrative control in 1956, a relationship
which became obviously problematic after the breakup of the soviet
mega-state in 1990 — and became even more of a problem when the US State
Department and our CIA stage-managed a coup against the Russia-leaning
Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Crimea is the site of
Russia’s only warm water naval bases. Do you suppose that even an
experience American CIA analyst might understand that Russia would under no circumstances give up those assets? Please, grow up.
WaPo | President Trump’s news conference Monday in Helsinki was the most embarrassing performance by an American president I can think of. And his preposterous efforts to talk his way out of
his troubles made him seem even more absurd. But what has been obscured
by this disastrous and humiliating display is the other strain in
Trump’s Russia narrative. As he recently tweeted,
“Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years
of U.S. foolishness and stupidity.” This notion is now firmly lodged in
Trump’s mind and informs his view of Russia and Putin. And it is an
issue worth taking seriously.
The idea that
Washington “lost” Russia has been around since the mid-1990s. I know
because I was one of the people who made that case. In a New York Times Magazine
article in 1998, I argued that “central to any transformation of the
post-Cold-War world was the transformation of Russia. As with Germany
and Japan in 1945, an enduring peace required that Moscow be integrated
into the Western world. Otherwise a politically and economically
troubled great power . . . would remain bitter and resentful about the
post-Cold-War order.”
This never happened, I
argued, because Washington was not ambitious enough in the aid it
offered. Nor was it understanding enough of Russia’s security concerns —
in the Balkans, for example, where the United States launched military
interventions that ran roughshod over Russian sensibilities.
Perhaps most crucially, by the mid-2000s, steadily rising oil prices had resulted in a doubling of
Russia’s per capita gross domestic product, and cash was flowing into
the Kremlin’s coffers. A newly enriched Russia looked at its region with
a much more assertive and ambitious gaze. And Putin, sitting atop the
“vertical of power” he had created, began a serious effort to restore
Russian influence and undermine the West and its democratic values. What
has followed — the interventions in Georgia and Ukraine, the alliance
with President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the cyberattacks against
Western countries — has all been in service of that strategy.
So
yes, the West might have missed an opportunity to transform Russia in
the early ’90s. We will never know whether it would have been
successful. But what we do know is that there were darker forces growing
in Russia from the beginning, that those forces took over the country
almost two decades ago and that Russia has chosen to become the
principal foe of America and the American-created world order.
nakedcapitalism | The term “economic shock therapy” is based on an analogy with
electroshock therapy for mental patients. One important analysis of it
comes from Naomi Klein,
who became famous explaining in 2000 the system of fashion production
through subsidiaries that don’t adhere to the safety rules taken so
seriously in Western countries (some of you may recall the scandal of Benetton and Rana Plaza,
where more than a thousand workers at a Bangladesh factory producing
Benetton (and other) clothes were crushed under a collapsing building).
Klein analyzes a future (already here to some degree) in which
multinational corporations freely fish from one market or another in an
effort to find the most suitable (i.e. cheapest) labor force. Sometimes
relocating from one nation to another is not possible, but if you can
bring the job market of other countries here in the form of a low-cost
mass of people competing for employment, then why bother?
The Doctrine in Practice
Continuing flows of low-cost labor can be useful for cutting costs.
West Germany successfully absorbed East Germany after the fall of the
Berlin Wall, but the dirty secret of this achievement is the exploitation of workers from the former East, as Reuters reports.
The expansion of the EU to Poland (and the failed attempt to incorporate the Ukraine) has allowed many European businesses to shift local production to nations where the average cost of a blue or white collar worker is much lower (by 60-70% on average) than in Western European countries.
The migrant phenomenon is a perfect counterpoint to a threadbare
middle class, given its role as a success story within the narrative of
globalization.
Economic migrants are eager to obtain wealth on the level of the
Western middle class – and this is of course a legitimate desire.
However, to climb the social ladder, they are willing to do anything:
from accepting low albeit legal salaries to picking tomatoes illegally (as Alessandro Gassman, son of the famous actor, reminded us).
The middle class is a silent mass that for many years has painfully
digested globalization, while believing in the promises of globalist
politicians,” explains Luciano Ghelfi, a journalist of international
affairs who has followed Lega from its beginnings. Ghelfi continues:
This mirage has fallen under the blows it has received
from the most serious economic crisis since the Second World War.
Foreign trade, easy credit (with the American real estate bubble of 2008
as a direct consequence), peace missions in Libya (carried out by pro-globalization French
and English actors, with one motive being in my opinion the diversion
of energy resources away from [the Italian] ENI) were supposed to have
created a miracle; they have in reality created a climate of global
instability.
Italy is of course not untouched by this phenomenon. It’s easy enough
to give an explanation for the Five Stars getting votes from part of
the southern electorate that is financially in trouble and might hope
for some sort of subsidy, but the North? The choice of voting center
right (with a majority leaning toward Lega) can be explained in only one
way – the herd (the middle class) has tried to rise up.
I asked him, “So in your opinion, is globalization in stasis? Or is it radically changing?”
He replied:
I think unrestrained globalization has taken a hit. In
Italy as well, as we have seen recently, businesses are relocating
abroad. And the impoverished middle class finds itself forced to compete
for state resources (subsidies) and jobs which can be threatened by an
influx of economic migrants towards which enormous resources have been
dedicated – just think of the 4.3 billion Euros that the last government
allocated toward economic migrants.
This is an important element in the success of Lega: it is a force
that has managed to understand clearly the exhaustion of the
impoverished middle class, and that has proposed a way out, or has at
least elaborated a vision opposing the rose-colored glasses of
globalization.
In all of this, migrants are more victims than willing actors, and
they become an object on which the fatigue, fear, and in the most
extreme cases, hatred of the middle class can easily focus.
Citizenship, Criticism, and Communism
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In the 1940s and ’50s, Americans engaged in an intense debate over the
content of school textbooks, particularly social studies texts. Fears of
communism a...
A Foundation of Joy
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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
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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
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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 ...
